Botanical Literature Goes Global:

Getting the Most out of the

Biodiversity Heritage Library.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is an international collaboration of natural history libraries working together to make biodiversity literature available for use by the widest possible audience through open access and sustainable management.

What is the BHL?

“The cultivation of natural science cannot be efficiently carried on without reference to an extensive library.”

C. Darwin et al 1847

Darwin, C. R. et al. 1847. Memorial to the First Lord of the Treasury [Lord John Russell... Accounts and Papers 1847, paper no. 268, vol. xxxiv, 253 (13 April): 1-3.

BHL Members US/UKNatural History Museums

• Academy of Natural Science • American Museum of Natural History• California Academy of Sciences• Field Museum• Natural History Museum, London • Smithsonian Institution

Botanical Gardens• Missouri Botanical Garden• New York Botanical Garden• Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

Academic Libraries• Botany Libraries, Harvard University• Ernst Mayr Library of the

Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University

Research Institute• Marine Biological Laboratory/

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Library

The Encyclopedia of Life

The EOL is an international effort to create an authoritative website for every species of the earth’s biota. The goal is to create a page for each species.

Project components include:• Education and Outreach• Informatics• Scanning & Digitization Literature• Species Pages

http://www.eol.org/

IA founded of the Open Content Alliance and is dedicatedto “universal access to human knowledge.”

The Internet Archive

IA provides BHL with: • Low cost mass scanning• Archival storage of files • Image processing• Technology development

http://www.archive.org/

Taxonomic Literature• Encompasses more than 250 years of systematic description of life

• The cited half-life of publications in taxonomy is longer than in any other scientific discipline

• The decay rate is longer than all other scientific disciplines

• Total literature represented by 1.3 million catalogue records

How big is the Biodiversity domain?• 800,000 monographs

• 40,000 journal titles (12,500 current)

• About 40% published pre-1923

• 73% are monographs, others are serials

• 63% are in English ; German is next (9%)

BHL Scanning Priorities

Botany

Angiosperms

Bryology

Ferns and allies Fungi Gymnosperms

Medical botany

Geographical distribution

Morphology

AnatomyAmphibiaArthropoda

Cyanobacteria

MolluscaMammaliaIchthyology

Natural history biographies

Atlases and gazetteersBiological diversity

Biodiversity conservationClassification and nomenclature

ExtinctionEvolutionEndangered species

Marine biologyHistory of natural sciences

Arachnida

Entomology

Linnaean works

Zoology

Algae

Plant anatomyPaleobotany

Reproduction

OrnithologyPorifera

Invertebrates

PaleozoologyPrimatology

ReptiliaProtozoa

Phylogenetic relationshipsPre-Linnaean works

Specimen catalogsScientific expeditions

Scientific illustration

Natural history dictionaries & encyclopedias

TaxonomySystematics

Core Materials: subjects that relate directly to or are closely associated with root disciplines of biodiversity scholarship

BHL, St. Louis

BHL Content Distribution

BHL Europe, London

Code available (open sourced, BSD licensed):  [1] http://code.google.com/p/bhl-bits/source/browse/trunk/utilities/grabby/grabbyd[2] http://code.google.com/p/bhl-bits/source/browse/trunk/utilities/bhl-sync.sh 

1

2 2

BHL, Woods Hole

The Global BHL

The Global BHL

BHL-Australia http://www.ala.org.au/

BHL-Europehttp://www.bhl-europe.eu/

BHL-Brazil http://www.scielo.br/

BHL-ChinaChinese Academy of Sciences • Institute of Botany

• Institute of Zoology

• Institute of Microbiology

• Institute of Oceanography

Photographs by Ernest H. Wilson,1908. Courtesy of the Arnold Arboretum Archives.

Taxonomic intelligence is the inclusion of taxonomic practices, skills and knowledge within informatics services to manage information about organisms. It uses a sophisticated algorithm to locate likely name strings in OCR text and has “discovered” 10.7 million name strings in NameBank and serves as a name thesaurus.

Taxonomic Name Server Services

Developed by MBL/WHOI

BHL & Copyright HoldersBHL supports an “opt-in” copyright model that will …

• integrate professional societies’ publications into the portal in keeping with the goals of the organization

• scan and deliver publications at no cost to the societies

• provide files to the publishers for their use

Smithsonian Institution Atherton Seidell GrantTaxonomic Literature, Online Edition: TL-3

The Seidell grant , with the endorsement of IAPT, will allow SI to rescan all volumes of TL-2 and the supplements and deliver content via BHL. BHL envisions a dynamically linked TL-3 that will connect citations to published references and allow for corrections and the addition of new content.

Related ProjectsRetooling Special Collections Digitization in the Age of Mass Scanning

The IMLS Planning Grant (2008-2009) allowed BHL partners to identify and develop a cost-effective and efficient large-scale digitization workflow and to explore ways to enhance metadata for library materials that are designated as “special collections.” The group held a series of meetings, communicated by email, and established a wiki to record meetings, track progress, and share documents about costs, statistics and workflows, and small-scale scanning tests. The report included extensive cost analyses and recommendations for equipment configurations to scan rare and oversized materials.

Exposing Biodiversity Field Books and Original Expedition Journals at the Smithsonian Institution -- The Smithsonian Institution National Herbarium & Archives

The Smithsonian will catalog all of its field books, unpublished journals, loose notes, sketches documenting field research related to all disciplines of biology. It will also will build a cataloging tool to and create a central repository so that other institutions can contribute their holdings. The enhanced level of description will improve access to these important research materials that are frequently difficult to discover and access remotely.

Cataloging Hidden Special Collections & Archives Grant

Related Projects

IMLS Grant for Advancing Digital ResourcesConnecting Content: A Collaboration to Link Field Notes to Specimens and Published Literature -- BHL Partner Libraries & Herbaria

The grant will develop a system for integrating biological researchers’ field and specimen notes with museum specimens and related electronically published literature. The enhanced and integrated access to biological data will serve a wide variety of users, and will connect to other ongoing projects such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library, a consortium that joined forces to deliver important, page-level digital content representing the core of published literature on natural history.

BHL Successes• Administratively separate and geographically dispersed

institutions can collaborate effectively• Taxonomic intelligence (species name finding) is highly

effective across millions of pages against nearly 11 million names in NameBank

• The project has generated excitement in the international community and many opportunities to develop new partnerships and sources of funding

• Society journal publishers are enthusiastic about participation in the BHL opt-in copyright model

• Partners have proven ability to generate significant financial support

• High levels of OCR accuracy in late 19th and 20th century printing

American Library Association AwardThe Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) awarded their Outstanding Collaboration Citation to the BHL on June 27, 2010 in recognition of their outstanding collaborative partnership.

BHL Challenges• Standards: “The great thing about standards is there are so many to choose from.”

• Delivering and preserving content through digitization & retrospective ingestion

• Establishing international governance

• Avoiding duplication

• Delivering new services

• Sustainability, Financial &Digital

谢谢Thank you! Judith WarnementBotany LibrariesHarvard University Herbaria22 Divinity AvenueCambridge, MA 02138 USAwarnemen@oeb.harvard.eduhttp://www.huh.harvard.edu/libraries/

Celebrating the Asa Gray ‘s Bicentennial1810-2010