Leopold’s journals that informed ‘A Sand County Almanac’ more accessible than ever before

This year marks the 75^th anniversary of "A Sand County Almanac," the collection of essays written by the famous naturalist Aldo Leopold. It's also the first year that the handwritten journals which informed Leopold's influential work have been transcribed and made more accessible than ever before.

Thanks to the careful work of passionate volunteers, University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries Digital Collections Center, University Archives and Records Management, and the Aldo Leopold Foundation, all 1,100 handwritten pages of Leopold's Shack journals are now more readable and searchable for public enjoyment and education. Explore, search, and read the journals here.

Leopold's connections to Wisconsin and UW-Madison are strong. He spent years as a professor at the university and his land restoration efforts at the UW Arboretum inspired personal restoration projects carried out at the Leopold Shack on his family's land in Baraboo, Wisconsin, which remains a hub for ecology and conservation to this day.

Stan Temple, who held the same professorship that Leopold did during his time at UW-Madison, is passionate about Leopold's detailed records on the changing season and his framework for both studying and relating to the natural world.

"In my capacity as a professor at the University of Wisconsin - and after my retirement as a senior fellow at the Aldo Leopold Foundation - I have used the Leopold archives a lot," says Temple. "But it was always a challenge, because so much of the important, raw data that I was looking for was handwritten and it couldn't be searched."

Say someone was curious when the first spring wildflowers began blooming in 1935, or how the state of sandhill cranes during Leopold's time compares to such observations today. Before this project, a person would have had to click through the digitized journals, reading every page of Leopold's handwriting for such observations.

"Adding the transcriptions is a game changer for research," says Jill Kambs, production manager of the UW-Madison Digital Collections. Adding transcriptions as digitized text allows users to search within both the text of Leopold's Shack Journals and items across the Digital Collections. For example, one can now search not only for how many times Leopold references chickadees in the Shack Journals, but also where chickadees are referenced across resources from authors in other collections as well.

Sharing both the historical records of Leopold's natural observations as well as his views of the world around him are at the core of the Aldo Leopold Foundation, says executive director Buddy Huffaker. He also noted that the project would not have been possible without the capacity and expertise provided through the partnership with UW-Madison Libraries Digital Collections Center and University Archives and Records Management, which houses the physical copies of the Shack Journals and other pieces of the Leopold Collection.

"It's an unparalleled insight into this brilliant scientific communicator's mind and work," Huffaker says, adding that the journals can be just as significant for people familiar with Leopold's legacy as for newcomers to his ecological efforts.

And none of it would be possible without the manual work of dedicated volunteers who know first-hand that it's one thing to read Leopold's illustrative work in its final published form, but another entirely to read the handwritten notes and observations that inspired them.

"We had over 60 volunteers throughout the project," says Kei Kohmoto, who was a fellow at the Aldo Leopold Foundation. Kohmoto spearheaded the coordination of volunteers, assigning them journal pages for transcription, instructing them on careful methods of note taking, and getting each transcription meticulously fact-checked.

"People would always reply back letting me know how much they enjoy transcribing it and making sure to let them know if there's any more opportunities that arise once the project itself ended too," Kohmoto says.

Kathy Miner was one such passionate volunteer. Miner, who is also a naturalist at the UW Arboretum, found her career path thanks to a college course that assigned "A Sand County Almanac" as required reading.

"[Leopold's] writing came to my attention at a particularly remarkable point in my life, where it was very meaningful," Miner says. "I guess I'd like that magic to be able to happen to a lot of other people."

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