For the last one hundred years, the USGS Eastern Ecological Science Center’s Bird Banding Laboratory (BBL) has received 10s of millions of bird banding records from permitted banders in North America. Over time, the BBL has collected these records in many different formats from paper, to digital data on floppy disks, to a new web-based data submission tool, the Bander Portal. However, much of the ancillary banding data (e.g., location details and morphometrics) reported in the earlier years (pre-2000s) of the Lab were not digitized at the time due to technical constraints (i.e., no computers and/or limited computer memory) and stored in a paper format making these legacy data difficult to store, access, and use. 

Starting in 2015, the BBL with the help of the Secondary Transition to Employment Program-USGS Partnership or STEP-UP program, undertook a project to digitize legacy paper records. STEP-UP provides 18 to 22-year-old students with differing abilities the skills needed to transition from an academic to a business setting. The students have become an integral part of the data archiving process.

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The Bird Banding Laboratory initiated this effort to digitize paper records, from 1960 to the early 2000s, containing banding information such as species, location, age, and sex. Even after the Lab switched to digital data submission in the early 2000s, there were millions of records to digitize. By scanning these records, the Lab ensures these are easily accessible for future uses. 

These data represent an important record of past ecosystem status and part of the USGS’s commitment to deliver actionable information relevant to decision makers. Each banding paper record can contain up to 100 banding records with one record representing one individual bird. Check out one of Lab’s own paper records from the Fall Migration Station in 1981 when the project was still in its infancy (see photo).

BBL Biologist Kyra Harvey said, “There’s this feeling of excitement that comes from seeing something that was written sixty-years ago. Though sometimes it’s hard to read the older cursive, seeing what ornithologists were researching and admiring back then provides a glimpse into the populations that have most likely changed.” 

To date, STEP-UP students and graduates employed at the USGS have digitized over 1.3 million bird banding records. More than 45 STEP-UP interns have come through the program. To date, Kevin Kim and Nicholas Gillespie have personally digitized and cataloged over 750,000 paper records for the project during their time in STEP-UP and later as USGS employees.

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Following the successful completion of scanning the 1960s-2000s legacy paper records, the team meticulously loaded the paper records, considered permanent records, into boxes and transported them to the National Archives in July 2024. Tens of millions of individual banding records on 1.3 million paper banding sheets were safely tucked away in a total of 365 file boxes! “It was a massive effort, and it’s so wonderful to know that these records will be safely stored and are now easily accessible,” says BBL’s Manager Antonio Celis-Murillo.  

However, the work is far from over. The BBL has already started to prepare the task of digitizing its legacy data starting from the program’s beginning in 1920.