| --- |
| license: other |
| pretty_name: US Navy Nurse Corps — Index Cards |
| tags: |
| - index-cards |
| - archives |
| - glam |
| - ocr |
| - navy |
| - biographical |
| - ww1 |
| - ww2 |
| - public-domain |
| task_categories: |
| - image-to-text |
| - image-classification |
| size_categories: |
| - n<1K |
| language: |
| - en |
| --- |
| |
| # US Navy Nurse Corps — Index Cards |
|
|
| **25 biographical service cards** from the US Navy's Bureau of Medicine and Surgery |
| (BUMED) History Office, one card per nurse, harvested from their Internet Archive |
| collection. Includes members of the **"Sacred Twenty"** — the first female Navy |
| nurses, appointed in 1908 (Esther V. Hasson, Lena S. Higbee, Elizabeth Hewitt, |
| Della Knight, M. Estelle Hine, Mary Du Bose, Margaret Murray, Sara Cox, Sara Myer, |
| Ada M. Pendleton, Florence T. Milburn, Clare L. De Ceu, J. Beatrice Bowman, |
| Elisabeth Leonhardt, Victoria White, Ethel Parsons, Isabele R. Roy) — and later |
| figures including **Laura Cobb** (WWII POW in the Philippines) and |
| **Theresa Burmeister** (1918 influenza victim). |
|
|
| Each row pairs the full-resolution card scan with the Internet Archive's ABBYY OCR |
| text and full provenance back to the source IA item. |
|
|
| ## Source & licence |
|
|
| - **Source:** [US Navy BUMED History Office](https://archive.org/details/usnavybumedhistoryoffice) collection on the Internet Archive. |
| - **Licence:** **Public Domain.** The source cards are works of the United States |
| Federal Government. Every source IA item carries the |
| [`Public Domain Mark 1.0`](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/). |
|
|
| ## Schema |
|
|
| | column | type | description | |
| |---|---|---| |
| | `image` | image | the card scan (JPEG, re-encoded from the IA JP2 derivative) | |
| | `ocr_text` | string | full-item OCR text from the IA ABBYY/DjVu output | |
| | `page` | int | page index within the source item | |
| | `source_id` | string | IA item identifier | |
| | `source_title` | string | IA item title | |
| | `source_collection` | string | IA collection (`usnavybumedhistoryoffice`) | |
| | `source_url` | string | `https://archive.org/details/<source_id>` | |
| | `license` | string | `public domain` (per row, all rows) | |
| | `theme` | string | `navy_nurse` | |
|
|
| ## How this was built |
|
|
| Part of an exploration of public archival index-card collections for GLAM/AI work. |
| The reusable harvester (resumable per-item parquet shards, polite IA access, |
| JP2 → JPEG decode via Pillow) runs on Hugging Face Jobs against a curated list of |
| IA items. |
|
|
| The productive IA discovery query (generic full-text is too noisy — overwhelmed by |
| playing cards / Pokémon cards / business cards): |
|
|
| ``` |
| title:"index cards" AND mediatype:texts |
| ``` |
|
|
| Each IA item bundles a `_jp2.zip` of all card scans plus ABBYY OCR derivatives, so |
| a single download yields both the images and weak text ground truth. |
|
|
| ## Citation |
|
|
| Please credit the source institution if you use this dataset: |
|
|
| > US Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, History Office. *Navy Nurse Corps Index |
| > Card collection.* Internet Archive: <https://archive.org/details/usnavybumedhistoryoffice> |
|
|
| Sibling archival-card datasets are being progressively released through the |
| [BigLAM "Index card datasets" collection](https://huggingface.co/collections/biglam/index-card-datasets-68e38b801f349a4ef520cf03). |
|
|
