---
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).