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Inspiring discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge...

February 10, 2014, 5:30 am
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On March 2013, with support from the National Science Foundation's Advance in Biological Informatics program and in collaboration with our Australian colleagues at Museum Victoria, BHL updated its website architecture to include the possibility of accessing and displaying article and chapter metadata.  


Our APIs and Data Exports were also modified to include this available information.  The BHL book viewer was updated to allow users to view multiple columns of pages on screen at once and more easily navigate to a specific page within a book. Users can also view OCR text alongside page images, and, where the books have been indexed, users can navigate directly to the articles or chapters within using a Table of Contents feature.   The custom PDF creation process was also modified to allow users to select pages for their PDF while in the book-viewer mode and more easily review the PDF before creation. Also, other important biodiversity informatics initiatives like ZooBank and The International Plant Names Index (IPNI), are now linking directly and more closely to BHL journals and pages using BHL’s citation disambiguation service, based on the OpenURL standard.


Now BHL is expanding the data model for its portal to be able to accommodate references to content in other well-known repositories. This is highly beneficial to end users as it allows them to search for articles, alongside books and journals, within a single search interface instead of having to search each of these siloes separately. BHL is strategic about the content providers it chooses to partner with and works with trusted organizations that provide relevant quality materials, technical know-how, resource support, and sustainability of content links. The improved BHL User Interface enables users to search among the 81,000 articles and chapters harvested and indexed from BioStor. So far, most of these articles have been identified from within BHL corpus of books and journals. But now, BHL has included metadata information provided by three well-known and trusted repositories of freely available biodiversity literature: Biblioteca Digital del Real Jardin Botanico (CSIC), Pensoft Publishers and the SciELO Network.



The Real Jardín Botánico Digital Library(RJB) from Madrid is an online bibliographic information service that aims to become the go-to reference for the Iberian Peninsula, Baleares, Macaronesia, north of Africa, Mediterranean region and Latin America and offer the biggest collection possible of classic works, periodic publications and other botanical works (historical, floristical and taxonomical) cryptogams and phanerogams).  RJB's Digital Library's objective is to become a work tool for researchers, environmental technicians, teachers, historians, amateurs, etc; providing also detailed bibliographic records and detailed descriptions of the contents and pagination of publications.  More than 6,000 book references from RJB have been added to BHL since January 2014.

Pensoft is well known in the academic community worldwide as a book and journal publisher, and as one of the pioneers of open access and data publishing. Starting in 1994, Pensoft has become one of the leading academic publishers in the field of natural history with more than 800 books and e-books published so far. The company is actively developing new tools and methods for dissemination of scientific information, including semantic technologies to enrich the article content and to export it to global data aggregators. The flagship open access journal of Pensoft, ZooKeys, is currently recognized as a technology leader in biodiversity publishing. Their latest innovation, namely the Pensoft Writing Tool and the Biodiversity Data Journal, present the first ever workflow to put manuscript authoring, community peer-review, publishing and dissemination within a single online collaborative platform. At the end, it comes to an integrated narrative and data publishing model which ensures that content is harvestable and re-usable by both humans and computers. BHL Users can find now almost 2,500 articles from Pensoft.


The SciELO Network's major objective is to contribute to the progress of academic research by improving the communication of research results in national quality journals. National journals fulfill an important function which is to complement international journals as far the communication of research undertaken nationally is concerned. The specific objective of SciELO is to increase in a sustainable way the visibility, quality, use and impact of the journals it indexes. In addition, it contributes to the development of national capacity and infrastructures for information and scholarly communication. The principal functions undertaken by SciELO have been the indexing of academic journals based on strict quality control measures, the online open access publication of full text on the Web, the measurement of performance with regard to downloads and citations and Web interoperability with indexes, and the products and services used for the indexing of scholarly content.  Users will find references to almost 9,000 biodiversity articles from the first 14 SciELO biodiversity journals harvested so far of a total of 38 available.


Note that, although freely and openly available, an important difference of this type of content from trusted repositories is that the text shown is not being hosted at the BHL's Internet Archive collection, like the rest of the BHL corpus, but rather on their respective external repositories.  This means that, even when BHL still allows discovery and access to the full-text from its Portal, and that BHL will benefit from all new additions and corrections to the content, we are not able to provide the exact same services of taxa name finding and showing the content in our own book viewer... just yet!  But to help clarify any confusion, our User Interface and RSS Feeds clearly indicate whenever you will be leaving our site to open a new window and access the external content from our partners.


Take a look at some of the examples that Pensoft: (biodiversitylibrary.org/part/98901), Real Jardín Botánico (biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/74811) and the SciELO Network (biodiversitylibrary.org/part/107970) have provided us with and tell us here, through the feedback form, what you think about this new way to discover and access more biodiversity content through the Biodiversity Heritage Library Portal.


William Ulate
BHL Technical Director

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The Collector Connection: United States Geological Survey

February 13, 2014, 8:00 am
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This is the final post of a joint blog series by the Field Book Project (FBP) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), showcasing examples of digital connections between collectors, field book catalog records, and the resulting publications of collecting events.

In 1878 the United States Congress was investigating rivalries between four surveys (Powell, Hayden, King, and Wheeler Surveys) that had been sent west to study the nation’s resources and search for a potential route for a railroad to the west coast. The investigation made it clear to Congress that the current system was not working. So Congress turned to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for guidance. NAS approached experts across the country for input, including survey leaders John Wesley Powell and Clarence King. Their subsequent recommendations, sent to Congress, provided the main structure for the legislation that created the United States Geology Survey (USGS).

In 1879, the USGS was established with the mission to provide: “reliable scientific information to describe and understand the Earth; minimize loss of life and property from natural disasters; manage water, biological, energy, and mineral resources; and enhance and protect our quality of life."

William H. Dall, c. 1910.  Smithsonian Institution Archives. RU 000095, Box 6, Folder 42.  SIA2009-4237.
The USGS had a mission, but now they needed the people with the vision to make it happen. King was named director, but left in 1881. Powell became the second director (1881-1894) and was an important force in shaping the new agency.

The USGS began sending staff into the field shortly after its creation. Staff surveyed and collected in national parks as well as local neighborhoods, like the DC-Maryland-Virginia environs. Their field books show a dizzying variety of collecting. The agency’s earliest field staff included individuals who would make important contributions to the fields of geology and paleontology. People like Charles Walcott, known for his discovery of the Burgess Shale, worked for the USGS 1879 – 1907 (eventually becoming its director in 1894), and conducted field work in the Grand Canyon among many other locations in the country. William Healey Dall worked for USGS 1884-1925, conducting research and spending significant time in Alaska for the Agency as well as the US Coast and Geodetic Survey; the work helped establish him as a well-respected expert in the geology of the state.

Charles Walcott's field notes from October 15 - November 3, 1879, Page 19.  Smithsonian Institution Archives. RU 007004, Charles D. Walcott Collection, 1851-1940 and undated; Box 32, Folder 1.  SIA2012-9643.

Other staff may not be so well known, like Lester Ward (1841-1913), but their field books document important routine field work with a specificity of detail that is fascinating. Specimen location information and interviews with individuals who found them sometimes list neighborhoods or street intersections. We encourage you to take a look at and compare the field books and the publications, the field work and the conclusions drawn from them.

Field Books:
Publications:

In November of 2011, the USGS Library joined the BHL consortium. Describing themselves as "one of the world’s largest libraries dedicated to the earth and natural sciences," they have contributed over 15,000 pages of digital content to the BHL collection.

By Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project, with contributions from Bianca Crowley, BHL Collections Coordinator
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BHL Day at the Melbourne Museum, opening event for the 5th Global BHL meeting

February 20, 2014, 5:30 am
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Ely Wallis (left) and Tim Hart
BHL Australia and the Melbourne Museum hosted "BHL Day" at the museum on 31 January 2014. Representatives of all the global BHL nodes (with the exception of BHL Egypt) were in attendance. BHL members were joined by staff and volunteers from BHL Australia as well as from the Atlas of Living Australia.

The day began with Caroline Martin, Bunjilaka Manager at the Melbourne Museum who welcomed the group with a traditional welcome from the indigenous people of Australia. Tim Hart, Acting CEO of the Melbourne Museum gave a welcome to the day's events. The Global BHL delegates also received a special tour of the First People exhibition by multimedia designer (and BHL Australia scanning coordinator) Joe Coleman.

Fenghong Liu (BHL China)
The morning session consisted of presentations from each of the attending nodes.

  • Nancy Gwinn, Chair, Biodiversity Heritage Library
  • Ely Wallis, Biodiversity Heritage Library Australia
  • Jinzhong Cui and Fenghong Liu, Biodiversity Heritage Library China
  • Jiri Frank, Biodiversity Heritage Library Europe
  • Abel Packer and Fabiana Montanari Lapido, Biodiversity Heritage Library SciELO (Brazil)
  • Anne-Lise Fourie, Biodiversity Heritage Library Africa

Joe Coleman, Connie Rinaldo,
 and Anne-Lise Fourie
After the presentations, three "provocative" questions were presented to the audience (which consisted of a number of Melbourne Museum, CSIRO, and Atlas of Living Australia staff (including ALA Director John La Salle). The questions posed were:

"Recent Literature" by John La Salle (Atlas of Living Australia). What are the questions and concerns about BHL more actively engaging in the acquisition of in copyright material?

"Topic Based Reprint Collections" by Robin Wilson (Senior Curator, Marine Invertebrates, Museum Victoria). Many scientists hold extensive reprint collections around their subject area of expertise. What provision can we make for incorporating such collection into digital repositories without inadvertently infringing copyright laws? How do we strike a balance?

"Archival Materials" by Martin Kalfatovic (Smithsonian Libraries / BHL). How can, and should, BHL proceed on expanding its collections of non-print materials (e.g. field notes, art work, etc.)?

The questions engendered lively and useful discussion and input for BHL writ large.

Abel Packer and
Fabiana Montanari Lapido
BHL SciELO
There was also a tour of the Melbourne Museum rare book collection and scanning center where the group met with the volunteer scanning staff.

A reception and opportunity to catch-up with colleagues ended the evening.

The Global BHL members wish to give Ely Wallis (Museum Victoria/BHL Australia) special thanks for organizing the event which was one of the most productive at a Global BHL meeting.

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Helping Out with Diverse Interests in Biodiversity: Taxonomy of Molluscs and Birds

February 25, 2014, 5:30 am
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Prof. Hamish Spencer (right) and his long-time 
collaborator, Prof. Jon Waters (left) examining the 
holdfast of a brown alga, Durvillaea poha, a species 
they and a student of theirs described after showing
 it was genetically distinct from the widespread D. antarctica.  
The holdfasts pictured are the habitat for a number of 
interesting invertebrates (e.g., molluscs, crustaceans). 
One of these, the gastropod mollusc Diloma durvillaea, 
was also described by them.

New Zealand is an exciting place to study biodiversity for a number of reasons. First, its unique set of plants and animals, evolving in the context of an active geologic history, results in several model systems that are ideal for testing ideas about how evolution works. Second, the country still has areas of its natural environment that are relatively undisturbed, something of which the wider public is very proud and which means that many people are interested in and aware of many native species. And, third, New Zealand is still in an “age of discovery” with undescribed species turning up in numerous studies across almost all habitats.

Hamish Spencer has had the good fortune not only living in such an amazing location but has also pursued a very rewarding career in preserving and improving understanding of the rich biodiversity found here. He currently serves as Director of the Allan Wilson Centre, a cross-institutional group of evolutionary biologists working on various aspects of New Zealand’s biodiversity.  He is also a Professor in the Department of Zoology at the University of Otago, in the city of Dunedin, known as the Edinburgh of the South.  

As part of our regular BHL and Our Users series, Professor Spencer has graciously agreed to answer some questions about how BHL has impacted that work.

When did you first discover BHL?

A while ago! Not sure.  Maybe 6 years?

What is your opinion of BHL and how has it impacted your research? 

It is fantastic! What is more important, even: it is getting better.  I am amazed at the breadth of its material, especially from the 19th Century. I work on the phylogenetics of a variety of groups (so far, molluscs, birds, trematodes, brown algae, polychaetes, crustaceans), usually as model systems to answer a question about the way evolution works. For example, I have been interested in the importance of long-distance dispersal in marine environments, especially the Pacific and Southern Oceans. With my collaborators, I have used brown algae, molluscs and crustaceans to investigate various questions about dispersal and sometimes venture into the taxonomy of these groups when the phylogenetic work reveals new species or clades. In order to do that properly, I like to consult original descriptions and, although Otago is New Zealand’s oldest university, with a good library dating back well over 130 years, sometimes that literature is simply unavailable.  That is where BHL comes in.

How often do you use BHL?

It is very sporadic.  Sometimes not for weeks at a time and then intensively for a week or so.

How do you usually use BHL? 

Usually I want a whole article from an ancient journal, so I download that.  I find that if I just read online, I inevitably need to check some detail and so I have to go back and look at I again. Sometimes, if I want some part of a book, I download just the relevant pages.

What are your favorite features/services on BHL?

I am amazed and impressed by the breadth of material available.  It is a real tribute to the many people who have gone to the effort of producing high-quality scans of so much material. It is seldom, now, that I am wanting to read something from the 19th century that is not there.  As a consequence BHL is becoming my first port-of-call for such items.  It is a bookmark I use frequently.

If you could change one thing about BHL, what would it be, or what developmental aspect would you like the BHL team to focus on next?

The one thing that does not work very well is the downloading of parts of an item.  Selecting a large number of pages and then finding a number of them are blank can waste quite a bit of time.  (I think you know this is an issue, already, though!)

If you had to choose one title/item in BHL that has most impacted your research, or one item that you prefer above any other in BHL, what would it be and why?

That’s hard, since I work on a range of groups, but I suppose the early issues of Proceedings of the Malacological Society of London would be up there (even though it is 20th century!).  More recently the (19th-century) Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia have been very useful.

We send our deepest thanks to Hamish Spencer for his participation in this series.  We’re always excited to learn more about how people are using BHL and the impact it has had on their work.  Gathering feedback on what our users would like to see changed or improved also helps us guide future development so that we can continue to improve and transform BHL to meet the needs of our users.  Have a story of how BHL has impacted your work?  We would love to hear from you! Send us an email to feedback@biodiversitylibrary.org.

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5th Global BHL Meeting, Lorne, Australia

March 6, 2014, 5:30 am
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Representatives from BHL-Global nodes at the
5th Global BHL Meeting 
The 5th Global Biodiversity Heritage Library Meeting was held in Lorne, Australia, February 1-2, 2014.   Representatives from each of BHL’s global nodes, with the exception of BHL Egypt, convened to discuss the status of current goals, the formation of new goals, and to work together in forming the overall direction of BHL Global.  The meeting consisted of reports from the global nodes, the election of officers, and discussion of bylaws, technical issues and goals.

The first day of the meeting consisted of presentations delivered by representatives from BHL Central and the Global Nodes.

BHL Central
Kicking off the presentations, Martin Kalfatovic, BHL Program Director, reported on BHL Central’s continued growth.  BHL Central is now comprised of 15 dues-paying member institutions, with a collection of over 42 million pages, and usage statistics that include over 3 million visitors since BHL launched in 2007.  In other news, the latest version of the Macaw software developed at the Smithsonian Libraries is now being tested at Harvard, New York Botanical Garden and the California Academy of Sciences with the University of Pretoria to also begin testing soon.  With this release, users can now upload to a cloud server, after which the files go to the Internet Archive and then the BHL portal.

BHL Africa
Anne-Lise Fourie, Principal Librarian at South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI), shared the good news that two more institutions in Kenya have joined BHL.  In South Africa, institutions are sending digitized content to the University of Pretoria for quality assurance.  To date, the Steering Committee has met twice with the possibility of more frequent meetings of the regional representatives to help build and maintain momentum.

Grants and Social Media 
Connie Rinaldo, Vice Chair of the BHL Executive Committee and Librarian of the Ernst Mayr Library, Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, reported on BHL’s grant-funded projects and on the status of BHL Central’s social media efforts.  BHL currently has four active grants, two of which are about to wrap up and two that just recently kicked off.  Connecting Content, an IMLS grant led by the California Academy of Sciences Library, is linking field notes, specimens, and published literature.  Connie demonstrated MCZ-Harvard’s contributions with the William Brewster collection.  Concurrently, the Art of Life is exploring automated ways of locating illustrations in natural history literature and providing metadata for them.  Led by the Missouri Botanical Garden, this NEH grant will broaden and engage the BHL audience by integrating tagging applications so users can edit descriptive metadata, and integrating that user-generated metadata to enhance access to illustrations.  The two new grants—Purposeful Gaming and the BHL and Digging Into Data—are both funded by IMLS and led by the Missouri Botanical Garden.  Purposeful Gaming and the BHL will develop a game to crowdsource OCR corrections for seed catalogs and transcriptions of field notes.  Digging Into Data will explore new methods for the explore integration of text mining, visualization, crowdsourcing and social media for enhancing use of BHL content.

Social media has been a strong component of the BHL outreach strategy and in 2013 over 36,000 visits to the BHL website came from social media platforms (out of a total of 1.4 million visits).  With recent staff departures, BHL's social media presence is shifting to maintenance mode and we've seen a corresponding decrease in traffic.  A discussion ensued about how best to tailor outreach efforts for maximum impact with existing resources, including recent efforts in the education domain such as BHL Europe’s Historian app for teachers and BHL Africa’s push to teach younger students about the environment.

Encyclopedia of Life 
Nancy Gwinn, Chair of the BHL Executive Committee and Director, Smithsonian Libraries, presented on the recent EOL meetings in Canberra.  The meetings included demonstrations for new tool suites including the recently released Traitbank, which provides the capability to assemble similar traits from across species for comparisons.

Biodiversity Library Exhibitions 
Jiři Frank, Vice-Chair of BHL-Global, reported on the current status of the BHL-E exhibition software and the group discussed the idea of having a "Treasures of the Global BHL" online exhibition.  We’re very pleased that Connie Rinaldo and Jiři have both already graciously volunteered their time for coordination and training, respectively.

Following the presentations and going into the second day, attendees moved to setting the direction for Global BHL for the coming year.  Each of the Global BHL Officers--Ely Wallis, Jiři Frank and Nancy Gwinn--were re-elected to two year terms in the offices of Chair, Vice-Chair and Secretary, respectively.  One of the first tasks that the re-elected executive committee will be taking on is the review of the bylaws.

Action items for the global nodes were also identified and will help guide collection and technical development, outreach efforts, and overall growth for the BHL global nodes in 2014.  BHL Central will work with the global nodes on creating new collections of content for inclusion in the BHL Portal and on continued development of Macaw.  Based on their extensive experience and thanks to their existing resources, BHL Europe will develop a marketing plan for others to use as a model.  BHL Australia will coordinate the collection of input from API users to help inform new features and improvements.  Finally, all nodes have agreed to work together on recruiting new nodes to ensure representation of all continents.

All told, it was a very successful meeting with inspiring updates from all and some exciting new directions for BHL-Global.  We're looking forward to working with our colleagues across the globe on completing the tasks we have set out to accomplish and working towards an ever-growing and adaptive BHL!



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2014 Annual BHL meeting held in New York City, March 10-11, 2014

March 18, 2014, 5:30 am
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BHL member and affiliates met in New York City for the 2014 Annual Meeting (10-11 March 2014). The annual meeting is a chance for the leaders of BHL members and affiliates to learn what is happening around BHL and to give updates from their own institutions.

This year, the meeting was held jointly by the New York Botanical Garden and the American Museum of Natural History. The first day of meetings was hosted by Susan Fraser, Director of the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden. The morning session of the meeting included the 2014 BHL Program Director's Report by Martin R. Kalfatovic; an update on user engagement from Carolyn Sheffield (BHL Program Manager); an overview of BHL technical activities from William Ulate (BHL Technical Director); and a report on the recent Global BHL meetings and membership committee report by Vice-Chair Connie Rinaldo. Bob Corrigan, Director of Operations for the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), also joined the meeting to give an update on EOL activities. Gregory Long, President and CEO of the New York Botanical Garden, welcomed the BHL members.

Attending the meeting were representatives from fifteen of the sixteen BHL members, including the three most recent members, Washington University of St. Louis, The National Library Board, Singapore (BHL Singapore), and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Our newest affiliate, the Natural History Museum, Los Angeles County, also attended.

The business portion of the meeting took place the following day at the American Museum of Natural History, hosted by Tom Baione, the Harold Boeschenstein Director of the AMNH Research Library. Tom also gave the group a tour of Natural Histories: Exploring Rare Books and Scientific Illustration exhibition, based on his book of the same title.
Pictured above are the meeting attendees:
Front Row, left to right: Susan Fraser (NYBG), Chris Mills (Kew), Christine Giannoni (Field Museum), Tomoko Steen (Library of Congress), Eric Chin (BHL Singapore), Nancy Gwinn (Smithsonian Libraries), Cathy Buckwalter (ANSP), Judy Warnement (Harvard Botany Libraries).
Second Row, left to right: Tom Baione (AMNH), Marty Schlabach (Cornell), Connie Rinaldo (Harvard/Museum of Comparative Zoology), Carolyn Sheffield (BHL Program Manager), Diane Reilinger (MBL/WHOI), Richad Hulser (NHMLAC).
Third Row, left to right: Kelli Trei (UIUC), Doug Holland (Missouri Botanical Garden), Chris Freeland (Washington University).
Back Row, left to right: William Ulate (BHL Technical Director), Martin R. Kalfatovic (BHL Program Director). 
NOT PICTURED: Jane Smith (Natural History Museum, London). Photograph taken at the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, New York Botanical Garden.

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First Meeting of the Mining Biodiversity project

March 20, 2014, 6:00 am
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Meet our international partners to extract data from BHL 


Mining Biodiversity (MiBio project) is one of the projects that won during the third round of the transatlantic Digging Into Data Challenge, a competition aiming to promote the development of innovative computational techniques that can be applied to big data in the humanities and social sciences. The project is an international collaboration between the National Centre for Text Mining (UK), Missouri Botanical Garden (US) and Dalhousie University’s Big Data Analytics Institute (Canada) and Social Media Lab (Canada), along with colleagues from the Encyclopedia of Life and the Smithsonian Institution.

We will integrate novel text mining methods, visualization, crowdsourcing and social media into the BHL to provide a semantic search system that allows users to explore search results according to multiple information dimensions or facets.  The goal is to transform BHL into a next-generation social digital library resource that facilitates the study and discussion (via social media integration) of legacy science documents on biodiversity by a worldwide community.
Relations between the Work Packages of the project

The project has five major components, covered in 9 Work Packages (WP):

  1. Automatic correction of errors in OCR using Google n-grams by our colleagues of the Big Data Analytics Institute (WP2).
  2. Crowdsourcing the annotation of semantic metadata (concepts and events) in legacy texts (WP5).
  3. Extract metadata (terms, concepts and significant events) automatically and track their change over time (WP3 & WP4) to facilitate semantic search (WP6) implemented with NaCTeM.
  4. Use interactive visualization techniques to manage the search results, in collaboration with Dalhousie (WP7)
  5. Design a social media layer as an environment for interaction and collaboration on science, education, awareness and outreach, lead by our colleagues of the SocialMediaLab (WP8).

Manchester Town Hall
at Albert Square, UK
On February 17th, the first face to face meeting in Manchester, UK marked the start of this new project.  The Principal Investigators of the project, Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd from Dalhousie University (Canada) and William Ulate from Missouri Botanical Garden (USA), met with Dr. Sophia Ananiadou at the University of Manchester's National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM), where her colleagues involved in the project showcased the tools and services they have developed and will be adapting for our project.

The National Centre for Text Mining (NACTEM)

NaCTeM has developed text mining services based on a number of generic natural language processing tools like Argo, their Web-based workflow construction platform for text mining, implemented on top of the OASIS Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) standard for interoperability among information processing components.

Example of an Argo workflow that automatically extracts
species and anatomical features using entity tagging
components that NaCTeM has developed for this purpose.
Several of the NaCTeM tools have been developed as modules that can be adapted and used as components in workflows, receiving input from the previous module, processing or performing a task and passing the results to another module.  In the case of named-entity recognizers, these receive text pre-processed into smaller units (sentences, tokens) and extract features automatically according to statistical models used by different entity taggers (specialized in gene, chemical, anatomical, habitat or species information, for example).

Another type of components of the workflows, in addition to named entity recognizers, are the linkers, which facilitate the automatic linking of names or concepts found in text to entries in external vocabularies via unique identifiers and using a string similarity method.

Argo's functionality allows workflows to be deployed as a Web service so they can be invoked by external applications, just like BHL currently invokes Name-finding web services to find the taxa within the text.

At NaCTeM commenting on the tools for the project.
L to R:  Mr. John McNaught, Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd,
Dr. Sophia Ananiadou, Ms. Riza Batista-Navarro,
Mr. Georgios  Kontonatsios and Mr. Paul Thompson.
Missing from the photo: Dr. Rafal Rak,
Claudiu Mihăilă, and Dr. Ioannis Korkontzelos.
In order to develop these named entity recognizers and linkers for the biodiversity domain, it is necessary first, to identify which entity types are of interest (in our case, it could be names of persons, places, species, among others) and the vocabularies to link to for each type.  To assist on this process, NaCTeM has also developed term extraction tools like TerMine.  TerMine detects terms and acronyms in input text and can be used in building a term inventory for biodiversity.  This is what the initial task for our colleagues at Missouri Botanical Garden and Smithsonian will be about: finding those authoritative sources (vocabularies, ontologies, thesauri, gazetteers, etc.) of terms to help build the term inventory and then train the entity taggers to be used in our workflows.

NaCTeM has also done substantial work on event extraction, i.e., the extraction of  associations or interactions between concepts or entities.  This experience will help us identify and extract the type of events that scientists, historians and other scholars have long wanted to extract from the BHL corpus (like behavior, habitat, trophic relations, geographic range and others ) for our own named-entities: species, people, places throughout time.  Finally, NaCTeM's vast experience developing customized semantic search engines like KLEIO, ISHER and Europe PubMed Central EvidenceFinder will facilitate providing an enhanced semantic search functionality over the BHL corpus text, to allow users to explore results according to multiple information dimensions or facets.

Additional information on the tools and services can be found at:
For some interesting explanation of what Unstructured Information is and the terminology of the process around it, look at this nice introduction of the UIMA 1.0 Standard.

Or read more details about these or some of the other service systems and tools that NaCTeM has developed.

The Social Media Lab

On Monday February 17th, 2014, as part of the third Social Media Workshop, which covered the outreach and impact aspects of the International Centre for Social Media Research at Manchester University, our group was invited to attend a talk by our colleague in the project, Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd, where he presented the research done at the Dalhousie University Social Media Lab, how to make sense of the huge quantity of data and the new methods to collect information when studying online social networks through analysis and visualization.

Social Media Lab at
Dalhousie University, Canada
© All Rights Reserved  
For our project, the staff at Dalhousie has started investigating what users and communities, as well as the context in which they are currently accessing, commenting and sharing the records from BHL across various social media platforms, such as Twitter and Flickr.  For this work they will be employing some of their own tools developed by the Social Media Lab (such as Netlytic.org) as well as other tools developed by third parties.  Their goal is to add a social layer to integrate content from different biodiversity fora and social media sites with BHL via a user-friendly interface, to foster a community of users that could exploit BHL as an environment for sharing digital objects.

For more information, take a look at:
And some of Dr. Gruzd's and the Social Media Lab staff other publications.

I hope this gives an idea of the work ahead and a better sense of what the project attempts to do and how it aims to do it.  We will keep you informed as results become available, but in the meantime, let us know how do you envision yourself using BHL as a social digital library?  What information you'd like to track and how you'd like to access it?  Tell us the vocabularies you'd need to see included and what types of named entities and associations you'd want to be tagged in the BHL corpus?

William Ulate
BHL Technical Director
Missouri Botanical Garden

This project is made possible in part by a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services [Grant number LG-00-14-0032-14].

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BHL and EOL team up for NESCent Research Sprint

March 27, 2014, 6:00 am
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Research teams at the NESCent-EOL-BHL Research Sprint.
Photograph by Cyndy Parr.

In early February, the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) hosted the EOL-BHL Research Sprint. NESCent, based in Durham, NC, is a non-profit science center supporting research in the evolutionary sciences. NESCent emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach to research, and so the idea behind the Sprint was to put together teams of programmers and life scientists to expose each other to questions and ways of thinking that they might not necessarily consider in their normal work. Informaticians could bring programming and data skills to bear on questions that scientists may not have had the programming expertise to implement effectively, using BHL's and EOL's now considerable amount of freely available data. Scientists could identify questions based on the data to programmers that they might not have considered. Plus, the meeting was useful in identifying how well researchers could identify and retrieve the data they needed from the BHL text corpus. To this end, William Ulate, BHL Technical Director and John Mignault, a member of the BHL Technical Advisory Group attended the meeting.

The teams covered a wide variety of interesting topics from studying the color of butterflies based on extracting color information from images to studying changes in ontologies over time based on an analysis of the text in the BHL corpus (see http://bit.ly/1dnnhG0). Over the course of the sprint, the teams began data mining EOL and BHL for their data sets and started preliminary analyses of their data. Each day, groups met at the end of the day to share experiences and progress. By the end of the sprint, each of the teams were sharing plans for further collaboration and completing their analyses. Plans for publication and grants proposals based on sprint ideas were also discussed. In an open, collaborative spirit, members shared the materials freely via Google Drive.

We learned some interesting things about the way people approach the BHL data set. Many of the teams on the first day wanted to use the BHL application programming interface for bulk data retrieval. Several team members asked us how they could download "all of the text." When we told them that this was impractical and would result in a great deal of unwanted data, they asked how they could retrieve data based on, for example taxa - I want to harvest all pages with names from this taxon (Chordata) or this common name (Vertebrate). Others wanted data restricted by location. We tried to assist them given their specific needs rather than their initial request for the whole data set (see http://bit.ly/1rvbut3). This raised useful questions as to how we can provide the data to researchers need in the ways they need it - should we offer ways to request bulk data downloads based on a specific set of criteria? Should we alter the API (http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/api2/docs/docs.html) in order to make it possible to retrieve more closely focused data sets? As BHL becomes better known as a source of "Big Data" for the biodiversity community, we will need to evolve our access to that data in order to better meet the needs of our users.

We were also surprised to discover the popularity of the R statistical programming language among scientists. Many team members used R in their work, to such an extent that a short R group discussion was scheduled for one morning during the meeting. Scott Chamberlain of Simon Fraser University has created an R interface to the BHL API, available at http://bit.ly/1oAFKjI. It is always good to see BHL and its data used in new and interesting ways. Follow up further results from this Sprint at: http://blog.eol.org.

The Sprint was a valuable meeting for BHL: it exposed our valuable data to more scientists and informaticians, and it gave BHL staff useful feedback on the uses of the BHL data corpus and its value to researchers. We would like to thank EOL, NEScent and the Richard Lounsbery Foundation for the opportunity and their collaboration in making this event a success.
     

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PDF Generation restored...

April 16, 2014, 3:59 pm
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Dear BHL users:

We are glad to inform you that our IT staff has solved the technical difficulties found with our PDF Generation process.  We have tested the service and it seems to be working well.

We apologize for the inconveniences this may have caused you. Please let us know through our Feedback form if you find any issues with this or any other BHL functionality again.

Regards,

William Ulate
BHL Technical Director
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BHL Technical Advisory Group meets at the Missouri Botanical Garden

April 17, 2014, 6:00 am
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For the 2014 BHL Technical Meeting, the BHL Technical Advisory Group (TAG) met at the Missouri Botanical Garden (MBG) (2-3 April 2014) with William Ulate (Technical Director) and Martin Kalfatovic (BHL Program Director). Also joining the meeting were the BHL tech team based at MBG (Trish Rose-Sandler and Mike Lichtenberg), Carolyn Sheffield (BHL Program Manager), Bianca Crowley (BHL Collections Coordinator, by phone), and Connie Rinaldo (BHL Executive Committee Vice-Chair, by phone).

From left: William Ulate, Siang Hock Kia, Carolyn Sheffield, Mike Lichtenberg, John Mignault, Keri Thompson, Trish Rose-Sandler, Martin Kalfatovic, Joel Richard. Not pictured: Chris Freeland, Connie Rinaldo, Joe de Veer, Bianca Crowley)
The group met to review BHL technical development priorities, staffing and communications concerns, and related topics.  Over the course of the two-day meeting, the group discussed priorities in terms of both core BHL technical operations as well as special projects that BHL participates in.  Core operations include things such as server and website maintenance for biodiversitylibrary.org.  The Tech Team also works closely with the BHL Secretariat and BHL Staff to review user feedback related to technical issues as they arise as well as suggested improvements to BHL functionality.  For example, one area for technical development that has come to the top of the list is full text searching and we're excited to share that work is getting underway to make that a reality.

In addition, the Tech Team is also actively involved in three grant-funded projects to enhance BHL: Art of Life (NEH), Purposeful Gaming & BHL (IMLS), and Mining Biodiversity (IMLS via the Digging Into Data Challenge).  BHL also participates in technical discussions with the larger biodiversity community.  This past December, William Ulate (Technical Director) and Joe DeVeer (TAG Member) virtually attended the iDigBio CITScribe Hackathon in Gainesville, Florida.  In February, Ulate and TAG Member John Mignault participated in the NESCent-EOL-BHL research sprint.

All in all, the Tech Meeting was an opportunity to review several aspects of BHL's technical direction, identify priorities, and strategize communication workflows for existing and new priorities.


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Biodiversity Heritage Library Adds Washington University as New Member

April 24, 2014, 6:00 am
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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries, welcomes Washington University Libraries (St. Louis, Missouri) as a new member. The 14th member of the BHL consortium, Washington University Libraries will help identify and digitize historical science literature from its collections and add these to the BHL’s online holdings, where all materials may be accessed free by the public.
Olin Library at Washington University in St. Louis.
Photographer and copyright holder: Robert Benson.   

Founded in 1853, Washington University in St. Louis is a medium-sized independent research institution widely recognized for its teaching, research, patient care and service to society. Washington University operates seven academic divisions (art and architecture, arts and sciences, business, engineering, law, medicine, and social work and public health), served by 12 libraries whose print holdings number nearly 4.5 million, in addition to millions more books and journals available electronically. For more information about Washington University Libraries, visit www.library.wustl.edu.

“The Biodiversity Heritage Library is the preeminent global repository for historic science literature,” said Martin Kalfatovic, BHL program director and associate director for digital services at the Smithsonian Libraries. “We are excited that the Washington University Libraries are joining us in building a vast information center that provides resources to researchers, students and anyone interested in biodiversity.”

The current members of the BHL include: the American Museum of Natural History (New York, N.Y.), the California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco, Calif.), Cornell University (Ithaca, N.Y.), the Botany Libraries (Harvard University), the Ernst Mayr Library at the Museum of Comparative Zoology (Cambridge, Mass.), the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.), the Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Woods Hole, Mass.), the Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis, Mo.), the Natural History Museum (London), the Kew York Botanical Garden (Bronx, N.Y.), the Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew, United Kingdom), the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.), and the United States Geological Survey. Additionally, the three institutions participate at the affiliate level: the Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago, Ill.), American of Natural Sciences of Drexel University (Philadelphia, Pa.) and the Natural History Museum, Los Angeles County. Beyond the English-language efforts, BHL-Europe was founded and includes 28 institutions that are working to digitize European literature. In addition, China, Australia, Brazil, and Africa have created national or regional nodes that may be accessed through the BHL portal.


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BHL Program Director gives keynote talk at the EOD Conference 2014

April 29, 2014, 5:30 am
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Helge Knuettel
(University of Regensburg)
introducing talk
On 11 April 2014, BHL Program Director Martin Kalfatovic gave a keynote address at the EOD Conference 2014. The conference, "EOD Conference 2014: Sustaining the networked future: use and reuse of digital content", was held at the University of Innsbruck. The talk was attended by about 150 librarians from around the European Union. EOD (eBooks on Demand) is a EU funded project to provide for digitization on demand for consortia members and this conference marked the close of the multi-year project.

The talk, entitled “Building for Demand: The Growth of the Biodiversity Heritage Library as Global Digital Library” can be found online here (and embedded below). More information on the conference.






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BHL Nominated for a Zedler Award for Free and Open Knowledge

May 6, 2014, 11:24 am
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BHL is honored to learn that we’ve been nominated for a Zedler Award by Wikimedia Deutschland.  This award acknowledges contributions of individuals, groups or projects who have made contributions to free and open knowledge.  Wikimedia Deutschland is an international, non-profit organization working to promote free knowledge through the collection, development and distribution of free content.

BHL has been nominated in the External Projects category along with other impressive nominees, including Humanitarian Open Street Map Team (http://www.europeana1914-1918.eu/de), the Free Music Sampler of the German Musikpiraten (http://musik.klarmachen-zum-aendern.de/artikel/viva_la_freevolucci%C3%B3n_-_der_free_music_sampler_2013_lieferbar-2527),
Europeana 1914-1918 (http://www.europeana1914-1918.eu/de) and Microsoft/the British Library for their project “One million images on Flickr Commons” (http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2013/12/a-million-first-steps.html).

Awards will be announced May 24 at 19.00h at the Westhafen-Pier in Frankfurt am Main.

Learn more about the Zedler Award: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Zedler-Preis
Learn more about Wikimedia Deutschland: http://wikimedia.de/wiki/Hauptseite


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BHL's Latest News!

May 15, 2014, 5:30 am
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BHL Spring 2014 Newsletter
The last several months have been an intense and exciting period of growth and expansion for BHL. Not only has the steady growth of collections continued but BHL as an organization has been growing as well. In the first two quarters of fiscal year 2014, three new Members and one new Affiliate joined BHL-Central. BHL’s global presence is expanding as well with one of those new Members also participating as a global node.

To learn more about each of the new BHL Members and Affiliate and what BHL has been up to across the globe, check out BHL’s latest newsletter and quarterly report. Covering both Quarter 1 and Quarter 2 of Fiscal Year 2014, the latest report also includes updates on BHL meetings and collaborations as well as collections, usage, and financial updates.

Enjoy!


BHL Quarterly Report, Q1 and Q2, FY2014
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Frame-worthy Fauna, Flora, . . . and Fossils?

May 20, 2014, 5:30 am
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Over the past few months, I’ve been working as the Biodiversity Heritage Library Flickr Content Volunteer. As someone who really values the cross-section between art and science, it’s a fascinating task. The Flickr page is full of beautiful images of flowers, birds, and butterflies. However, have you ever considered the beauty in rocks and bones?

Most of the items I’ve been adding to the BHL Flickr page were published in The Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, a 19th century journal with articles on geology, paleontology, and paleobotany. I’m sure any geologist would say I’m late to the party, but I was pleasantly surprised by the various diagrams and illustrations in this Victorian journal. Below I highlight a few of the most interesting, surprising, and just plain beautiful images I’ve come across so far.

Plesiosaurus conybeari and brachycephalus.
Volume 37 (1881).
From what I’ve observed, there are two camps when it comes to skulls and bones: those who find them fascinating, and those you find them morbid. I absolutely fall in the first camp, finding it interesting to see how different bodies are structured and fit together. If the remains are that of a species we’ll never have the chance to see, even more so, making these plesiosaur fossils of particular interest. It’s mind-boggling to imagine these reptiles of the early Jurassic era swimming about. Among Nessie believers there’s a theory that the Loch Ness monster is a member of the Plesiosauria order which managed to avoid extinction. With that long neck and those paddle-like limbs, I can definitely see why.

Cross section of the Welland Valley.  Volume 29 (1873).
This image is an interesting representation of the different layers of clay, sand, and limestone in the Welland Valley of eastern England. The two views offer a look into where researchers observed hundreds of different sand fossils, such as Teleosaurus teeth and cephalopods in the Lincolnshire Limestone. However, that’s not the only reason it caught my attention. It’s on this list because—with a bit more hatching—this could easily be mistaken for the beginning of an Edward Gorey – Dr. Seuss collaboration. I didn’t expect whimsy from a Victorian geology journal, but I sure found it.

Map illustrating the structure of the volcano of Mull. Volume 30 (1874).
The colors in this map of the Isle of Mull, Scotland are so incredibly vibrant even 140 years later. Not only beautiful, it’s very informative, highlighting the locations of various igneous and aqueous rocks in the area. It even helped me realized that “loch” not only means “lake” but also “inlet.” Lessons in geology and Gaelic all in one place!

Fossil Fern from Cape Breton. From Volume 18 (1852).
Sometimes it feels like ferns don’t get the same praise and attention as flowering plants. That’s hard to believe after seeing this beautiful depiction of fossil ferns found near the coal mines of Sydney, Nova Scotia. The most remarkable aspect of the image may just be the article it accompanies. It’s a fascinating read offering a glimpse into the thought process behind identifying the “uncommonly interesting species” seen here.

Eozoonal rocks. Volume 22 (1866). 
This plate illustrating the inorganic nature of eozoonal rocks just might be my favorite of the bunch. It looks like a page from a comic book set in space or a post-apocalyptic Earth. In fact, Figure 2 looks like it came straight from the background of Pat Aulisio’s Bowman comics. I can definitely imagine this one hanging next to the artwork I already own. In fact, I just may do that! Many of the images in BHL’s Flickr stream are in the public domain and have been made available using a Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY License. Images which may still be in copyright (generally those published after 1922) have been assigned a Creative Commons non-commerical license meaning users are free to repurpose for non-commercial use.

The Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London has been quite the surprise. There are several more volumes to go through, so I can only imagine the surprises will keep coming. In the mean time, it looks like I need to buy a frame that can do justice to eozoonal rocks.

Written by: Adriana Marroquin, Flickr Content Volunteer at the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Check out an older post to read about my previous internship with the BHL and how I’ve used BHL images in the past.

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BHL presentation to the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries

May 22, 2014, 5:30 am
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On April 30, 2014 I attended the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries (CBHL) annual conference at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in Richmond, VA. CBHL describes itself as, "an international organization of individuals, organizations and institutions concerned with the development, maintenance and use of libraries of botanical and horticultural literature." With the extent of the BHL's digitized botanical literature available for free access, CBHL members are regular users and big fans of BHL.

I was delighted to be invited to present an update on BHL happenings over the past year or so, including such highlights as the adoption of a new mission, vision, and goals; our new website user interface (launched in March 2013) and its new article access features, as well as link outs to biodiversity materials on external websites; and our new membership structure and newest members/affiliates.

It was my first time attending a CBHL meeting but hopefully not my last as this easy going group immediately made me feel welcomed. Granted it may be because they are such strong supporters of the BHL, after all they awarded us the Charles Robert Long Award (2013) for our successful collaborative efforts with botanical libraries worldwide. I was impressed with the group's strong sense of camaraderie and community, and level of organization. As so many BHL participating institutions (Missouri Botanical Garden, New York Botanical Garden, Smithsonian Libraries, Harvard University Botany Libraries, and Cornell University's Mann Library) are CBHL members themselves I look forward to our networks cross-pollinating in the future!

If you'd like to see more about how the BHL has grown over the past year+, please take a look at my presentation on slideshare:


-By: Bianca Crowley, BHL Collections Coordinator
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The Life of a Field Biologist and Practical Biodiversity Informatician: Cam Webb

June 3, 2014, 5:30 am
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As part of our regular BHL & Our Users series, Connie Rinaldo (MCZ Librarian and BHL Executive Committee Member) recently caught up with Cam Webb, a Senior Research Scientist at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University.  We were very pleased to hear about how he has been exploring BHL and what he discovered.  Enjoy!


1.  What is your area of interest?

I study the trees and forests of SE Asia, from ecological, floristic and biogeographic angles. I also enjoy ‘practical informatics’: mashing up biodiversity data from a variety of sources.

2.  How long have you been in your field of study?
Broadly defined... about 25 years.

3.  When did you first discover BHL?

I think pretty much when you first opened.

4.  What is your opinion of BHL and how has it impacted your research?

BHL is a vital tool for me.  I live in West Kalimantan, Indonesia and so have no local physical access to botanical libraries. The nearest one is on Java, at the Indonesian National Herbarium (Herb. Bogoriense); it has a surprisingly good range of older publications, but I don’t get there as often as I’d like.  But with BHL, in a few seconds (or longer... depending on bandwidth here!), I have access to many of the original (and sometimes only) descriptions for the plant taxa out here.


5.  How often do you use BHL?

I use BHL a couple of times a month on average, sometimes more frequently.

6.  How do you usually use BHL?  

Almost always I’m looking for species descriptions, ecological details, and particularly images.

7. What are your favorite features and services on BHL?

So, I have to admit, as I was answering these questions, I started digging into the API options (Application Programming Interface) you offer, that I hadn’t really looked at before, and was blown away as to how many ways you offer to query your database and view the publication pages. One of the main challenges I have for using BHL, given the limited  bandwidth available here in Kalimantan, is the multiple webpage loadings required to get from submitting a taxonomic name to being able to check if a page will be worth reading, partially because the default page viewer loads a fairly high-resolution page image in the popup. So I hacked together a simple script (http://xmalesia.info/doc/bhl_pages.html) that takes a taxonomic name, calls your API, and returns a single page with embedded thumbnails of matching pages in BHL. This way, I can quickly identify which pages might be worth looking more carefully at.  So now I have to say that my favorite service on BHL is the API!  Thanks!

8.  What would you like BHL to focus on developing next?

For myself, I’d have to say that continuing to expand the coverage of the core document set would still be the highest priority.  There are a number of key references for Indonesia (many of them in Dutch)
that I have not found yet in BHL.

9. If you had to choose one title or item that has impacted your research or something that you love in BHL, what would it be?

It is having Flora Malesiana scanned and available online!

Thank you, Cam, for sharing your work and how you use the Biodiversity Heritage Library!

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Transcribing the Field Notes of William Brewster

June 5, 2014, 5:30 am
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Ivory-billed woodpecker from
Brewster's journal of 1890
William Brewster (1851-1919) was a renowned American amateur ornithologist, first president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and a president of the American Ornithologists' Union. He was an avid collector of birds and their nests and eggs, and collected over forty thousand specimens from 1861 until his death in 1919. His collection, bequeathed to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, is considered one of the finest private collections of North American birds ever assembled. Though Brewster collected throughout North America, his collection is especially comprehensive in its coverage of the birds of New England. Brewster thoroughly documented his collecting trips. His journals and diaries are a gold mine of scientific observations and a delightful account of years spent exploring the woods, fields, lakes, and rivers of New England.

The Ernst Mary Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology is in the process of digitizing its collection of Brewster’s field notes and observations, and making these available worldwide via the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). As part of the Purposeful Gaming project led by the Missouri Botanical Garden, and funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, we have begun efforts to transcribe Brewster’s voluminous field notes, with the ultimate goal of making the full text of his observations searchable and available for any number of uses.

As an initial trial project, we have placed ten digitized volumes of field notes on two crowdsourcing websites, and we invite anyone interested to help us accomplish our goal of transcribing at least 2000 pages of Brewster’s journals. The crowdsourcing websites chosen for this project are the Biodiversity Volunteer Portal (BVP), a collaboration between the Australian Museum and the Atlas of Living Australia; and a BHL installation of FromThePage, a transcription tool developed by Ben Brumfield.

Birds observed by Brewster on Martha's Vineyard in 1890
Please feel free to visit one or both of these sites, create an account, and enjoy Brewster’s idyllic writing style while helping to unlock his valuable observations for the benefit of all. We also invite you to browse Brewster's diaries and journals on the BHL portal.





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Biodiversity Heritage Library Adds University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as New Member

June 10, 2014, 5:30 am
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Main Library

The Biodiversity Heritage Library, headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries, welcomes the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a new member. The 16th member of the BHL consortium, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will help identify and digitize historical science literature from its collections and add these to the BHL’s online holdings, where all materials may be accessed free by the public.

“The Biodiversity Heritage Library is the preeminent global repository for historic science literature,” said Martin Kalfatovic, BHL program director and associate director for digital services at the Smithsonian Libraries. “The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has partnered from the start with the BHL and BHL members for many years and we are excited that we can formalize our partnership by welcoming them as our 16th member.”

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library is a campus-wide network of libraries serving programs of learning and research in many disciplines and is the largest public university research library in the country with more than 13 million volumes. The Biology Library collection alone contains over 137,000 volumes and there are many more in related departmental libraries on campus, such as the agriculture, natural history, and rare book and manuscript collections. For more information about the University Library, please visit library.illinois.edu.

The current members of the BHL include: the American Museum of Natural History (New York, N.Y.), the California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco, Calif.), Cornell University (Ithaca, N.Y.), the Botany Libraries (Harvard University), the Ernst Mayr Library at the Museum of Comparative Zoology (Cambridge, Mass.), the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.), the Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Woods Hole, Mass.), the Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis, Mo.), the National Library Board (Singapore), the Natural History Museum (London), the Kew York Botanical Garden (Bronx, N.Y.), the Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew, United Kingdom), the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.) and the United States Geological Survey. Additionally, three institutions participate at the affiliate level: the Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago, Ill.), the American of Natural Sciences of Drexel University (Philadelphia, Pa.) and the Natural History Museum, Los Angeles County (Los Angeles, Calif.).

Beyond the English-language efforts, BHL-Europe includes 28 institutions that are working to digitize European literature. In addition, China, Australia, Egypt, Brazil and Africa have created national or regional nodes that may be accessed through the BHL portal.

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Nine Smithsonian Field Books Now in BHL!

June 12, 2014, 5:30 am
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The Biodiversity Heritage Library is pleased to announce that nine of the Smithsonian field books that were cataloged and imaged as part of the Field Book Project are now available through the BHL portal!

With over 43 million pages of the published biodiversity literature, BHL has greatly improved the efficiency of access to the published literature--much of which was previously available online in limited physical copies in but a few select libraries in the developed world.  As unique primary source documents, field books present similar challenges and we are very pleased to provide another layer of access to these important materials.

Scientists' field notes are, in many ways, the precursors to the published literature.  Journals (the unpublished kind), diaries, collecting lists, photo albums, and other primary source documentation of collecting events can enhance not only the scientific understanding of what has already been published but can also provide insights into the historical, sometimes even personal, context behind the research.

The Field Book Project has cataloged over 7,000 Smithsonian field books and imaged over 400 of those which are available through the Smithsonian Collection Search Center along with additional contextual information in the form of collection records and authority files.  The nine field books chosen as the first testbed set for ingest into BHL include item records and page scans for seven diaries created by David Crockett Graham and two photo albums from the Harriman Alaska Expedition (1899) from the collections of the Smithsonian Institution Archives.  Each item not only tells its own fascinating story of exploration but also provides information and insights that complement materials already in BHL.

In addition to making these available alongside the related literature in BHL, we are especially pleased to see these notes joining the 62 other field notes that are already in BHL thanks to the Connecting Content project.  The original vision for the Field Book Project was to create one online location for field books, regardless of physical location. Now you can view the Smithsonian field notes alongside those from the California Academy of Science, Missouri Botanical Garden, New York Botanical Garden, Harvard Botany Libraries and Museum of Comparative Zoology.  And with the crowdsourcing transcription efforts underway both at the Smithsonian Transcription Center and kicking off with BHL's Purposeful Gaming project earlier this month, we're looking forward to seeing more great things come out of our continued partnership with the Field Book Project!

David Crockett Graham (1884-1961) was an American missionary and collector working in China over the period of 1911-1948.  In the U.S., Graham had studied theology, anthropology, and ethonology.  As part of the Proceedings of the United States National Museum (v.80, 1932), BHL has made available an article authored, detailing the architectural structures, carvings and artifacts he observed in the artificial caves in Szechuan Province.  But his work was not limited to cultural and anthropological inquiry.  Graham also spent summers collecting biological specimens for the U.S. National Museum (now the National Museum of Natural History), receiving the honorary title of Collaborator in Biology in 1932. His diaries from those summers provide a fascinating perspective onto his experiences while collecting, from the logistical aspects of organizing a collecting team and their supplies to the impact of heavy rains and extreme heat on their travels.  His natural curiosity is evident as he pesters a stinky beetle (June 6, 1928) and marvels at how, after discovering a large number of moths in a nearby bush, they do not come to his lantern at night (June 14, 1928).

Entry from June 6, 1928 of David Crockett Graham's
Diary no. III., May 27, 1928 - October 12, 1928

The Harriman Alaska Expedition (1899) is the fascinating--and true--story of a railroad tycoon's family vacation and scientific expedition rolled into one.  After his physician recommended a vacation to combat exhaustion, Edward Henry Harriman, President of the Union Pacific Railroad, began planning a big game hunt for his family.  Exhausted as he may have been, though, he remained ambitious even in rest.  By the time they set sail for Alaska on May 31, 1899, the family vacation transformed into a full-scale exploring expedition.  The list of participants reads like a roll call of renowned scientists, naturalists, and artists of the time, many of whom whose names are still well-known today: Clinton Hart Merriam, Frederick Vernon Coville, Thomas Kearney, William Healey Dall, Robert Ridgway, and over a hundred others.

Fairweather Range --Seen across Glacier Bay from Sunday Island
Souvenir of the Harriman Alaska Expedition, May-August, 1899,
volume 1, New York to Cook Inlet
Not surprisingly, the expedition resulted in several publications, including the Harriman Alaska Series a multi-volume report on Alaska's geography and biodiversity, including insects, crustaceans, and invertebrates.  The two photo albums were assembled as souvenirs for expedition participants and include hundreds of photographs, the bulk of which show Alaskan landscapes and glaciers as they appeared in 1899. While some photographs from the expedition were also included in the reports and other publications, as a whole, these albums help to fill in our contextual understanding of the place and time in which Alaska's biodiversity was being recorded by the Harriman Expedition.  They also offer a glimpse into the human experience of the expedition, from a family outing on Lowe Inlet to a fire drill aboard the George W. Elder.

Fire Drill
Souvenir of the Harriman Alaska Expedition, May-August, 1899,
volume 1, New York to Cook Inlet

We hope you enjoy taking a look through the first of the Smithsonian field notes to be added to BHL. Let us know what you discover by leaving us a comment!




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