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In Review

HISTORIC COLLECTIONWard’s Wonders Photographs by J. Adam Fenster

A new initiative is giving a digital life to a historic collection of scientific specimens housed at the University for nearly 150 years. Now located in several departments on campus, the specimens were originally brought together in the late 1800s through the work of Henry Ward, a Rochester professor who founded the science supply company Ward’s Natural Science Establishment. By about 1880, Rochester was home to the third-largest such collection in the United States.

Known as The Ward Project (online at Wardproject.org), the effort is a collaboration involving the Departments of Biology and Earth and Environmental Sciences and the River Campus Libraries. Led by Robert Minckley, senior lecturer in the Department of Biology, and Melissa Mead, the John M. and Barbara Keil University Archivist and Rochester Collections Librarian, the online resource features 2-D and 3-D images of specimens, 19th-century and modern taxonomies, catalogs, and correspondence.