Taylor Wilderness Research Station

Taylor is a secluded facility in the heart of the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness in central Idaho, which University of Idaho has owned and managed since 1970. Surrounded by over two million acres of wilderness, the facility has been an invaluable resource for wildlife surveys, rangeland monitoring and plant identification. A few years ago, the CDIL was contacted by the people who run the station and were asked to digitize around 2000 documents that were vulnerable to deterioration. The documents were wide ranging, consisting of correspondences, memos and reports as well as hundreds of research papers that were the result of academic residencies at the station.

Overview

In another project, CDIL Fellows Jack Kredell went to Taylor (which can only be hiked into or flown into on small backwoods planes) and interviewed professors, graduate students and superintendents at the institution. The goal of the project was to create a collection combining these two resources, which would not only give access to all of the scientific research that came out of the station but also interpretive material that would help visitors to the site better understand the historic, human and geographic context of the institution.