Frick Fossil Finder
Half of the 400,000 specimen fossil mammal collection is the world famous Frick collection of fossil mammals. Portions of the Frick collection are not cataloged as AMNH numbers, but exist as entries in the Frick Shipping Records - a collection of decades old record books that tracked the shipment of 200,000 or so fossils. A large portion of these items have not been entered into the AMNH catalog; as a specimen is requested, a new AMNH catalog number is assigned to the specimen. The shipping records contain a "Frick number" which is a 3 part number in this format:
[Location]-[Numbers Indicating Box]-[Unique Specimen Number]
Example: AINS-12-3456
The fields of data that appear in the horizontal section at the top of the shipping record page refer to every specimen listed on the page below. The Frick shipping number needs to be created from a letter code that we would provide (it doesn’t appear on the page), the box number on the upper right of the page and the individual number in the "Field No." column. So if we told you the letter code for this record was A, then for the specimen listed next to the Field No 88, the Frick shipping number would be A-5-88. The columns/fields we would need out of this project (for every specimen listed on the page) would be:
- Frick shipping number - this should be parsed into three parts
- AMNH catalog number (e.g. F:AM 42326) - this should be parsed into two parts: F:AM and 42326
- Shipping point
- Collector - parsed into first and second names
- Date recorded
- Date
- Season at
- Description (called Specimen on the page)
- Text recognition - has OCR improved?
- Or a crowdsourcing transcription app
