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
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenVRA April 2013 Providence RI Art of Life project
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
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenVRA April 2013 Providence RI Art of Life project
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
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenVRA April 2013 Providence RI Art of Life project
BHL FT Staff
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenVRA April 2013 Providence RI Art of Life project
BHL Global
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenVRA April 2013 Providence RI Art of Life project
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenVRA April 2013 Providence RI Art of Life project
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?
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenVRA April 2013 Providence RI Art of Life project
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
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenVRA April 2013 Providence RI Art of Life project
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenVRA April 2013 Providence RI Art of Life project
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
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenVRA April 2013 Providence RI Art of Life project
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenVRA April 2013 Providence RI Art of Life project
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
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenVRA April 2013 Providence RI Art of Life project
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.
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenVRA April 2013 Providence RI Art of Life project
Schema landscape review– VRA Core 4.0 (image community)– LIDO (museum community)– Dublin Core (Web community)– Darwin Core (biodiversity community)
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenVRA April 2013 Providence RI Art of Life project
ART OF LIFE SCHEMA ELEMENTS red =required
TitleTypeDateCopyrightSourceAgentSubjectsDescriptionInscription
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenVRA April 2013 Providence RI Art of Life project
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
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenVRA April 2013 Providence RI Art of Life project
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
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenVRA April 2013 Providence RI Art of Life project
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)
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenVRA April 2013 Providence RI Art of Life project
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
•
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenVRA April 2013 Providence RI Art of Life project
For more info http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Art+of+Lifehttp://www.biodiversitylibrary.org
Contact: [email protected]