---
license: other
pretty_name: Card File of the Flora of the Metropolitan Parks (Harvard Botany, 1894–1895)
tags:
- index-cards
- archives
- glam
- ocr
- botany
- herbarium
- public-domain
- natural-history
task_categories:
- image-to-text
- image-classification
size_categories:
- 1K<n<10K
language:
- en
---

# Card File of the Flora of the Metropolitan Parks (Harvard Botany Libraries, 1894–1895)

**4,574 botanical specimen index cards** from the Harvard University Botany
Libraries' *Card File of the Flora of the Metropolitan Parks, 1894–1895 (bulk)*,
compiled by **Walter Deane** (1848–1930). Records flora of the Metropolitan Park
system around Boston — Middlesex Fells Reservation, Blue Hills, Norfolk County,
and adjacent areas — with one card per specimen entry: species, locality,
collection date, collector, habitat notes.

Harvested from the 7 IA items
[`mhg795390874cardfile{1a, 1b, 1c, 1d, 2a, 2b, 3}`](https://archive.org/details/mhg795390874cardfile1a).

Each row pairs the full-resolution card scan with the Internet Archive's ABBYY OCR
text and full provenance back to the source IA item.

## Source & licence

- **Source:** Harvard University Botany Libraries — *Card File of the Flora of
  the Metropolitan Parks, 1894–1895* (compiled by Walter Deane).
  Source IA items: [`mhg795390874cardfile1a`](https://archive.org/details/mhg795390874cardfile1a)
  through `cardfile3`.
- **Licence:** **Public Domain.** Harvard's own IA item metadata declares
  `possible-copyright-status: NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT`. The cards are 1894–1895 records;
  the compiler Walter Deane died in 1930. Please retain the attribution to
  Harvard University Botany Libraries on reuse.

## Schema

| column | type | description |
|---|---|---|
| `image` | image | the card scan (JPEG, re-encoded from the IA JP2 derivative) |
| `ocr_text` | string | full-item OCR text from the IA ABBYY/DjVu output |
| `page` | int | page index within the source item |
| `source_id` | string | IA item identifier |
| `source_title` | string | IA item title |
| `source_collection` | string | IA collection (`harvardbotanylibraries`) |
| `source_url` | string | `https://archive.org/details/<source_id>` |
| `license` | string | `undetermined` (legacy field — the actual status is NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT per Harvard) |
| `theme` | string | `natural_history_specimen` |

> Note: rows carry `license: undetermined` from the harvest pipeline, which only
> reads the IA `licenseurl` field. Harvard's `possible-copyright-status:
> NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT` lives in a separate metadata field and is the operative
> rights statement.

## How this was built

Part of an exploration of public archival index-card collections for GLAM/AI work.
The reusable harvester (resumable per-item parquet shards, polite IA access,
JP2 → JPEG decode via Pillow) runs on Hugging Face Jobs against a curated list of
IA items.

Productive IA discovery query (generic full-text is too noisy):
```
title:"index cards" AND mediatype:texts
```

## Citation

> Deane, Walter (compiler). *Card File of the Flora of the Metropolitan Parks,
> 1894–1895 (bulk).* Harvard University Botany Libraries. Available via the
> Internet Archive: <https://archive.org/details/mhg795390874cardfile1a>.

## Sibling datasets

[`biglam/index-cards-cas-galapagos-stewart-specimens`](https://huggingface.co/datasets/biglam/index-cards-cas-galapagos-stewart-specimens)
— Alban Stewart's 1905–06 Galápagos expedition specimen card file (CAS Archives).

Browse the wider catalogue:
[BigLAM "Index card datasets" collection](https://huggingface.co/collections/biglam/index-card-datasets-68e38b801f349a4ef520cf03).