George Beccaloni's blog

Probably the historically most important of all the enclosures to any of Wallace's correspondence in the Wallace Family Archive at the Natural History Museum, London, is an offprint of the famous 1858 Darwin-Wallace paper on natural selection - the scientific article which launched the evolution revolution. This paper is widely regarded as being one of the most important scientific papers of all time, and what is special about the NHM's copy is that it was owned and annotated by Wallace. A pdf of this document is now available for the first time.

The WCP is looking for 2 enthusiastic volunteers to join our small team at the Natural History Museum, London, for one day a week to assist with various project tasks.

We are looking for someone with;
- Good IT skills
- Attention to detail
- Experience of using databases
- Experience of cataloguing
- Interest in history of science/Victorian history
- Enthusiasm

After several days of work I have managed to migrate the data from a 116 page MS Word table which lists all of the British Library's (BL) Wallace correspondence, into the Project's Access database. This table was produced by our previous Archivist Anna Mayer, who visited the BL numerous times in order to carefully thumb through and catalogue all of their Wallace letters. Our database now holds records for a grand total of 3100 letters. Of these 1200 are deposited in the NHM and 1600 are in the BL.

I have just put a new version of the WCP's transcription protocol up on the Transcription page of this website - click on the following link if you want to download it: http://wallaceletters.myspecies.info/sites/wallaceletters.myspecies.info/files/WCP_Transcription_Protocol.Version_6_0.pdf The protocol was revised with helpful suggestions from Charles Smith, Anna Mayer, John van Wyhe, Caroline Catchpole and Efram Sera-Shriar.

READ THIS - IT COULD SAVE YOU A LOT OF TIME!

Several hundred letters to and from Wallace have so far been transcribed by students from Harvard University and others. The transcripts are currently saved as separate MS Word 2003 documents, although ultimately we will probably convert them to a non-proprietary format.

THE PROBLEM