Harvard Forest now has a full-time data manager (Richard Lent), with responsibility for strategic planning and oversight of all aspects of research information management and support. The site also is now fully connected to Harvard University's computer network in Cambridge via a high-speed leased telephone line. All of our offices and labs in all three HFR buildings have been wired with network cable. Approximately 35 IBM-compatible PC's are now directly connected to Harvard and the Internet. All HFR personnel have Harvard University electronic mail accounts and have switched over to using Eudora e-mail software.
With LTER supplementary grant funds, HFR has significantly upgraded mass storage and data archiving capabilities. New hardware acquisitions include six CD-ROM drives, plus a CD-recordable drive for making our own CDs; 35 Connor tape drives; five internal and one external Bernoulli cartridge drives; six gigabyte-range hard drives; and a Microtek ScanMaker III color scanner. In addition to the new hardware, optical character recognition software now enables scanning and machine-reading of old typescripts stored in the Harvard Forest archives. We are also evaluating neural-network software that translates scanned paper maps into GIS layers. These acquisitions will aid in the conversion of older, archival materials into machine-readable data.
Richard Lent, Harvard Forest