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

野外笔记是自然学家用来记录原始观察研究的新的或重新利用的空白本子。到目前为止，对形式和功能之间关系的研究主要集中在印刷品的精美装订上：关于普通、廉价和文具装订的文献要少得多。拟议中的研究将检验博物学家如何、为什么以及从哪里获得他们带入该领域的合订本。将近代早期（约1600-1800年）的野外笔记本的材料和构造与家用和商用笔记本进行比较。最初的研究将集中在自然历史博物馆（伦敦）的藏品上，然后扩展到林奈学会、国家档案馆和几个较小的资料库。预计用作实地笔记本的物品将在形式、功能和质量上有很大的差别——研究将确定和检查物品的财务价值与其内容的认知智力价值之间的关系（如果有的话）。检查缝纫结构，纸张质量，和页码将加强应用高水平的显微镜和高光谱成像。由于缺乏对文具装订的研究，自然导致文献的匮乏，因此本项目将考虑历史背景下的材料。对文具商和装订商记录的检查将形成一个成本、供应和需求的框架，与印刷书籍的记录形成对比：现有的研究目前对两者几乎没有区别。收集到的数据将帮助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收集成为全球研究受众的访问。这些成果也将对记录这种未被充分探索的书籍形式具有永久价值，尽管如此，几个世纪以来，这种形式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.