The purpose and development of the infrastructure during the project, and whether it was a milieu or platform that received funds, and how it evolved.

The purpose of the project has been to make available Linnaeus’ extensive and important correspondence on a digital platform by collecting letters in various scattered archives and making available their content through summaries in English of elusive content in Latin and Swedish as well as with regular transcripts. The present project is a continuation from the project IN12-1365: 1 and works with four levels of publishing on the project database.

1. Transcripts of the letters
2. Summaries of the contents of the letters in English
3. Digital facsimiles of the manuscripts
4. PDF’s of earlier editions and translations

The project’s results are important for several different areas. It is primarily about the science and scientific networks of the 18th century, but it is also a resource for language studies of scientific terms in Swedish, as well as for cultural and personal history. The material also lends itself to popular scientific writing.


The results of the project so far.

The most important outcome of the project is the establishment of an entirely central resource for research in the 17th century natural history and scientific networks at an international level. It has been achieved primarily by making available the material in languages other than Swedish and Latin and that so on the four levels: transcripts of the letters; summaries of the contents of the letters in English; digital images of the letters; as well as in some cases pdfs of earlier editions and translations. More than 6,000 letters and over 700 correspondents have been added to the system, and the number of transcripts has increased substantially.

The initial project was intended as a text-critical edition, an ambition that was then abandoned in favor of making summaries in English with digital imagery of the letters. But as materials were gradually published on the project database and the attention was drawn internationally, more and more requests came from users around the world to also transcribe the (about 5,000) letters that had not been transcribed in the first round.

For this project, the work has mainly involved transcribing letters to and from Linnaeus in Swedish, especially the major correspondence in Swedish (with Abraham Bäck, with the Secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences from 1739 onwards, with Linnaeus’ nearly twenty disciples, with Carl Gustaf Tessin and with a long line of other persons with long series of letters mainly to Linnaeus).

This work proved to be far more extensive than we assumed initially, therefore this project was launched to reach the goal. The project has continuously delivered results to the project server provided by the Center International d’étude du XVIIIe siècle, Ferney-Voltaire. This means that we have continuously come into contact with users who have informed us of their wishes and comments. It also served as an excellent reference when we contacted libraries and archives to get scans, for example.

Because it is a project database, the question of how this important resource is going to live on is always important to us. To this end, we have agreed with Uppsala University Library that the project database should be migrated to their Alvin system. The work of migration itself takes place naturally for the last time in the project.

The work has not been completely completed with this project, but everything is ready for migration. Detailed tests have been made, and it is because of shortage of time we do not want to switch to Alvin until the last uploads have been made and checked in the system. Something that also proved difficult was to find, order and digitized on the project website a large number of letters from foreign archives (from Belgium, Finland, Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, UK, Germany, USA). These letters were known to us before, but only after we got them in digitized format it became possible to transcribe them.

As previously stated, the project has generated a lot of experience on how digital editions of extensive correspondence can be implemented. Not least, the project has shown that it is essentially not a technical issue, but a question of knowledge of Linnaeus, his time and his science that is needed, along with Latin and Swedish knowledge.

After migrating the database to the Alvin system, Uppsala University Library will assume responsibility and operation of the database. It is a natural home for Linnaeus’s correspondence. Likewise, the Center International d’étude du XVIIIe siècle, who until now has worked with the project database is keen to ensure that the work has a permanent home and a will survive, and we are confident that this will be the case and that this resource will be further developed in an excellent way at Uppsala University Library.


Briefly on how the infrastructure was used and what research was initiated using the infrastructure.

Resources may be taken for granted when they are in place and may not automatically receive praise, but from Linnaean Society that attracts many Linnaeus researchers, and with whom we have worked closely together, we have always been told how they are using the project database and how they themselves inform their visiting researchers about it. Most users have already found this resource through other channels. In our own contacts with colleagues from around the world, we are told that this is an important and very useful resource. Some of our favorite examples are the following. It may apply to a historian in Hong Kong who researches the 18th century botany and the circulation of books, as well as a researcher in Britain researching the cultural history of heredity or a Colombian scientist’s work on Jacquin’s Caribbean expedition 1754-1759. In other words, it is difficult, if not to say impossible, to identify in advance which research will benefit from this resource. However, we have already made a difference in many respects and are proud of it.


Unforeseen technical and methodological problems, as well as deviations from the original plan.

Our problem has been to correctly estimate the time needed for careful editing. In retrospect, it can be said that it is the extensive editorial work that has taken the most time and therefore should have been given more resources.


Integration into the organization, as well as how the infrastructure will be maintained in the long term.

The project has agreed to be transferred to Uppsala University Library and published in their Alvin system. The University Library has all the prerequisites for continuing editorial responsibility for this resource and has Sweden’s foremost history of science department in close proximity.


Infrastructure accessibility and relation to the requirements for Open Access and Open Science.

The infrastructure has been freely available through the project site during the project. The Alvin system will deliver the same availability. Some of the facsimiles we have acquired require certain restrictions on secondary publishing.


Any international cooperation.

We have reported above how researchers around the world already benefit greatly from this resource. Linnean Society has reported to us that they have noted increased interest and a larger number of requests due to our database.

We have previously also reported on the collaboration in Linnaeus Link, which continues http://www.linnaeuslink.org and is a digital catalog of the most important stocks in the world of Linnaeus’s printed works. This way one may add items from that database to ours and vice versa. In addition, the Linnean Society has digitized Linnaeus’s herbarium, insect collection, fish collection and shell collection as well as his own annotated books. Those can also be linked to our database. Such a future project has already been discussed among researchers in the UK and Sweden, among other things. This requires extensive work but may prove important to maintain the quality of the database. And already, researchers in the project “A Naturalist at Work: Carl Linnaeus and His Information Processing Technologies” have made an effort in this direction that seems very promising.


Any publications resulting from the research carried out in connection with the infrastructure.

Among the many external research work that has been published, Hanna Hodacs, Kenneth Nyberg and Stéphane Van Damme, eds., Linnaeus, Natural History and the Circulation of Knowledge (2018) must be emphasized. There are several papers that are based on the database in that book. The volume is based on two international workshops.


Links to own web pages.

The projects have continuously delivered the results to the project server throughout the project

http://linnaeus.c18.net