Reach Out! Opportunities for the Visual Resource Center

Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenVRA April 2013 Providence RI Art of Life project

Reach Out! New Opportunities for the Visual Resource Center

The Art of Life project: a case study


What is BHL?

• A consortium of natural history, botanical libraries and research institutions

• An open access digital repository for historic biodiversity literature

• An open data repository of taxonomic names and bibliographic information


Member Institutions• Academy of Natural Sciences Library and Archives• American Museum of Natural History Library • California Academy of Sciences Library• Cornell University Library • The Field Museum Library• Harvard University Botany Libraries • Harvard University, Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology • Library of Congress • Marine Biological Laboratory / Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Library• Missouri Botanical Garden Library• Natural History Museum, London, Library & Archives• The New York Botanical Garden • Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Library & Archives• Smithsonian Institution Libraries • United States Geological Survey Libraries


BHL FT Staff


BHL Global



Why the need for Art of Life?Problem statement – users want access to images, access to images is

limited – How to broaden the audiences for BHL content?


What is Art of Life?

• Full title - The Art of Life: Data Mining and Crowdsourcing the Identification and Description of Natural History Illustrations from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL)

• Grant given to Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis• Funded by National Endowment for the Humanities• Runs May 2012-April 2014



5 Primary Objectives of Art of Life

Objective 1: Define an appropriate metadata schema for natural history illustrations

Objective 2: Build software tools to automatically identify illustrations in the BHL corpus

Objective 3: Enhance existing tools to enable the initial sorting, viewing, and editing of these identified visual resources.

Objective 4: Integrate tagging applications to enable a community of users to edit descriptive metadata for the illustrations

Objective 5: Integrate the descriptive metadata generated by users back into BHL portal both for access and preservation



Current status of Art of Life• Development of the algorithm is about 90% complete and will

be done by May 2013• Draft schema for describing natural history illustrations

available for public review http://tinyurl.com/9hm7nsb• Classifier tool – in progress


Art of Life SchemaNeeds to support three objectives:

(1) to enable the discovery, description and use of the identified images by artists, biologists, humanities scholars, librarians, and educators;(2) to make BHL’s metadata and images available to other platforms; and(3) to import crowdsourced metadata generated in other platforms back into BHL.


Schema landscape review– VRA Core 4.0 (image community)– LIDO (museum community)– Dublin Core (Web community)– Darwin Core (biodiversity community)


ART OF LIFE SCHEMA ELEMENTS red =required

TitleTypeDateCopyrightSourceAgentSubjectsDescriptionInscription


Title Stictospiza formosa

Type Paintings

Date Publication: 1898

Agent Author: Arthur G. Butler (1844-1925)Illustrator: F.W. Frohawk (1861-1946)

Description A pair of finches with green and yellow bodies resting on reeds

Subjects Scientific name: Amandava formosa (Latham, 1790) Vernacular Name: Green Avadavat or Green MuniaAccepted Name: Amandava formosa (Latham, 1790) Birds, finches

Inscriptions bottom center: Green Amaduvade Waxbill (Stictospiza formosa)

Source Butler, Arthur Gardiner. Foreign finches in captivity. Hull and London: Brumby and Clarke, limited,1889 (2nd edition). This image comes from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and is available online at biodiversitylibrary.org/page/17195895

Rights Public domain

Example of illustration described using Art of Life schema

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Biodiversity_Heritage_Library

http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/17195895


How will this project benefit the visual resource community?

• Significant resource of natural history images that will be made openly accessible and reusable-

• Content is very cross-disciplinary (artists, art historians, biologists, humanities scholars, particularly historians of science; librarians, visual resource curators).

• Interesting application of the Core 4.0 standard beyond its traditional domain


Thanks to Art of Life team!PI

Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenAlgorithm development

Ed Bachta, Charlie Moad, Kyle Jaebker, Indianapolis Museum of ArtSchema development

Gaurav Vaidya and Robert Guralnick, University of Colorado, BoulderWilliam Ulate, Missouri Botanical Garden

ProgrammingMike Lichtenberg, Missouri Botanical Garden

Consultants Doug Holland, Missouri Botanical Garden; Chris Freeland, Washington University (former PI for Art of Life)


Interested? Here’s how you can help• We welcome your feedback on the schema! http://tinyurl.com/9hm7nsb• If you know of scholars and users who would be interested in these types

of images and would be interested either in participating in our survey or a brief focus groups about the schema please have them contact me [email protected]

• Would love to talk with other folks about their experiences with crowdsourcing of metadata, particularly if you’ve used flickr or Wikimedia commons

• Spread the word about this free, rich resource of images! http://www.flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary

•


For more info http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Art+of+Lifehttp://www.biodiversitylibrary.org

Contact: [email protected]

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Reach Out! Opportunities for the Visual Resource Center

Education