Our knowledge of dragonflies and damselflies in Pennsylvania just got a bit richer and a lot more accessible. Hal White, working together with Clark Shiffer, local odonatologist extraordinaire, compiled digital records of long-kept analog accounts of odonate records in Pennsylvania. From Hal’s introductory comments:
For a series of articles on Pennsylvania Odonata published between 1968 and 1971 …, George H. Beatty, III with the help of Clark N. Shiffer attempted to gather all known records for the state. These included literature references, museum collections, field notes, and records from others they could obtain. These were recorded in a loose leaf notebook. The original notebook is currently in the Frost Museum at Penn State University. That notebook was copied in the 1960’s and entries were recorded in both until 1971. Additional records continued to be added in the second copy by Clark N. Shiffer through June 2011. In all, there are almost 1500 pages of records, many with over 30 entries.
These are the original notebooks here at the Frost:
The scanned pages can be accessed through the figshare repository:
Shiffer, Clark N.; White, Hal B. (2014): Pennsylvania Odonata Records. figshare. DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.1056508
Also available in that fileset are some explanatory documents about how the records were compiled, abbreviations used, etc. Watch for a publication about this dataset soon …