Membership of the IMO Commission for Agricultural Meteorology (1913-1947)

The dataset has been built as part of a research project on the history of agricultural meteorology in the first half of the twentieth century. The dataset provides information on the members of the technical commission on agriculture established by the International Meteorological Organization (IMO) in the years 1913-1947.
The main sources used to build the dataset are the proceedings of the meetings held by the IMO, and in particular the membership lists printed in these proceedings. Information provided by these primary sources has been constantly examined for consistency and correctness and, whenever possible, biographical resources on individual members have been consulted and mentioned in the dataset here presented.
The sql files in the dataset allow to re-build the MySQL database that was created to investigate the commission membership and its transformation over time. A copy of the data tables is also available in csv format for the users who wish to access only the data. In the dataset there are twelve tables. Eleven tables provide information (affiliation, nation, city, role in the commission) on the scientists listed as members of the commission for a specific time period. There is a table for each year (1913, 1919, 1921, 1923, 1926, 1929, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1946, 1947) in which a membership list is available. NationH and NationG stands for Nation(History) and Nation(Geography), similarly for cityH and cityG. In this way, it is possible to place commission members also within modern countries and cities, not only their historical counterparts, if one wishes to build a map of the members’ location using current geodata. The role of each member within the commission has only three possible options: president, secretary/vice-president, member. The last table in the dataset, m_all, provides a comprehensive list of all the over one-hundred members of the commission with some biographical details on them (when available). The idmembers value is the unique identifier for each member within this dataset.
This dataset has been used in an extensive investigation on the role that the IMO had in promoting international collaboration in agricultural meteorology during the first half of the twentieth century. The data here gathered, however, can be of interest beyond the history of agricultural meteorology. They also offer relevant materials to scholars more generally concerned with the work of the IMO, and the database structure provides a template for similar data collection work on other IMO technical commissions. These commissions were key places for sharing meteorological and climatological knowledge between mid-nineteenth century and mid-twentieth century and they certainly deserve more attention than the one they have so far received from scholars.

I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the German Research Foundation (DFG) (Project No. 321660352) in the preparation of this dataset.

本数据集系作为一项关于二十世纪上半叶农业气象学历史的研究项目之组成部分而构建。该数据集提供了国际气象组织（IMO）于1913至1947年间设立的农业技术委员会成员的相关信息。构建数据集的主要来源为IMO举办的会议纪要，尤其是其中所刊印的成员名单。这些原始资料提供的信息经过持续的一致性及准确性审查，并在可能的情况下，查阅并提及了每位成员的传记资源。数据集中的SQL文件允许用户重建用于研究委员会成员及其随时间变化情况所创建的MySQL数据库。此外，为方便仅访问数据的使用者，数据表亦以CSV格式提供。数据集中包含十二张表格，其中十一张表格提供了特定时间段内被列为委员会成员的科学家信息（所属机构、国籍、城市、在委员会中的角色）。每张表格对应一个有成员名单的年份（1913、1919、1921、1923、1926、1929、1932、1935、1937、1946、1947）。'NationH'和'NationG'分别代表'历史国籍'和'地理国籍'，同理适用于'cityH'和'cityG'。通过这种方式，若需利用当前地理数据进行成员位置映射，可以将委员会成员置于现代国家和城市中，而不仅仅是他们的历史对应地。每位成员在委员会中的角色仅有三种可能选项：主席、秘书/副主席、成员。数据集中的最后一张表格'm_all'提供了超过一百位委员会成员的全面名单，以及一些可用的个人传记信息（如有）。'idmembers'值是该数据集中每位成员的唯一标识符。该数据集已被广泛应用于对IMO在二十世纪上半叶促进农业气象学国际合作所起作用的广泛研究中。然而，此处收集的数据对于更广泛关注IMO工作的学者而言亦具相关价值，且数据库结构为其他IMO技术委员会的类似数据收集工作提供了一个模板。这些委员会是自十九世纪中期至二十世纪中期分享气象学和气候学知识的关键场所，它们理应获得比迄今为止学者们所给予的更多关注。此外，本数据集的准备工作得到了德国研究基金会（DFG）（项目编号321660352）的财政支持。