Introduction

The process I’ll be discussing has its origins in realizing a fundamental lack of understanding of the project I’d been working on for months. After transcribing hours of oral history material, processing thousands of research papers, and combing through metadata to create a digital collection on a natural science archive, I began to recognize a critical gap. My inability to grasp the area where all of the research was conducted obscured both my understanding of the material and my connection to the people conducting the research. I also realized that if I was struggling with this understanding, patrons and researchers using this digital resource would likely also feel this disconnection.

The Taylor Wilderness Research Station, nestled in central Idaho’s Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, has been a vital research hub since the University acquired it in 1970. Accessible only by plane or hiking, it supports wildlife surveys, rangeland monitoring, and climatology amid over two million acres of protected wilderness.

A few years ago, the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning (CDIL) was contacted by station managers to digitize at-risk scientific papers and internal documents. In a separate project, CDIL Fellowship recipient and PhD candidate Jack Kredell visited people involved in the station’s management and maintenance to uncover “often-ignored social and experiential content behind scientific pursuit.”

The project, led by Devin Becker, Associate Dean of Research and Instruction, envisioned a collection combining these two resources. The goal was to provide access to all scientific research produced at the station, along with interpretive material to help visitors better understand its historic, human, and geographic context.