From Field to Philosophy: Structures, Content, and Context of Notebooks at the Natural History Museum.

野外笔记本是博物学家用来记录主要观察研究的新的或重新利用的空白书籍。迄今为止，关于形式与功能之间关系的研究主要集中在印刷品的精美装帧上：关于普通、廉价和文具装帧的文献要少得多。拟议中的研究将研究博物学家如何、为什么以及从哪里获得他们带到实地的装订卷。从早期现代时期（约1600 -1800年）的材料和建设领域的笔记本电脑，将与笔记本电脑用于家庭和商业用途进行比较。最初的研究将集中在自然历史博物馆（伦敦）的收藏品，然后扩展到仔细检查在林奈协会，国家档案馆和几个较小的存储库中保存的材料。可以预见，作为野外笔记本的物品在形式、功能和质量上会有很大的不同--研究将识别和检查物品的经济价值与其内容的感知知识价值之间的关系（如果有的话）。缝纫结构、纸张质量和页码的检查将通过高级显微镜和高光谱成像的应用得到支持。缺乏对文具装订的研究自然会导致文献的缺乏，因此本项目将在历史背景下考虑材料。对文具商和装订商的记录进行检查，将建立一个与印刷书籍相反的成本、供应和需求框架：现有的研究目前对两者几乎没有区分。收集的数据将有助于NHM确定利用其手稿收藏的研究财富，使一个隐藏的主要资源材料的集合，成为全球研究受众访问。这些成果也将在记录这种未充分开发的书籍格式方面具有永久价值，但这种格式在几个世纪以来一直是许多人生活中的重要工具。

Field notebooks are new or repurposed blank books used by a naturalist to record primary observational research. Research on relationships between form and function has thus far focused on fine bindings of printed matter: literature on plain, cheap, and stationery bindings is much less prevalent. The proposed research will examine how, why, and where naturalists sourced the bound volumes they took into the field. The materials and construction of field notebooks from the early modern period (ca.1600-1800), will be compared with notebooks intended for domestic and business use. Initial research will focus on the collections of the Natural History Museum (London), before expanding to scrutinise material held at the Linnaean Society, the National Archives, and several smaller repositories. It is anticipated that items used as field notebooks will range widely in form, function, and quality - research will identify and examine relationships (if any) between the financial value of the object and the perceived intellectual value of its contents.An examination of sewing structures, paper quality, and pagination will be bolstered by the application of high-level microscopy and hyper-spectral imaging. A lack of research on stationery bindings leads naturally to a dearth of literature, so this project will consider the material in historical context. An examination of stationers' and bookbinders' records will develop a framework of costs, supply, and demand in contrast to those of printed books: existing research currently makes little distinction between the two. Data gathered will assist the NHM in identifying exploiting the research wealth of its manuscript collections, enabling a hidden collection of primary resource material to become accessible to a global research audience. The outcomes will also be of permanent value in documenting this under-explored book format which has nevertheless been an essential tool in the lives of many people over the centuries.