Book of the Week: Stop and Smell the...Algae?

Take a deep breath. Ahhhhhh. Now take another.

Desmarestia viridis

Did you know that every second breath you take, you owe to the ocean? Yes, it’s true: the ocean produces more than half of the planet’s oxygen supply which accounts for one out of every two human breaths. More specifically, we owe gratitude to microscopic phytoplankton. These varieties of algae are atrophic organisms, able to produce their own food via photosynthesis. Oxygen is a major by-product of this fascinating process that transforms sunlight into food therefore, algae underpins ALL earth’s ecosystems and life on earth. Algae may be one of the most altruistic lifeforms I’ve ever heard of. Can you imagine being able to create your own food just by absorbing the sun’s rays and on top of that creating the very oxygen that sustains life? Algae why are you so good to us?

So this week, let’s pay homage to this unassuming and oft overlooked life-form and give it the proper credit it deserves. After all, without algae we wouldn’t be here today.  We are pretty sure that Kintaro Okamura (1867-1935), a famous Japanese algologist from the Meiji Era knew how critical algae organisms are to our continued existence. He was so beloved in Japan for his work on algae that the Japanese Emperor and government conferred on him the Decoration of the Third Class of the Order of the Sacred Treasure. Quite the honor. It is clear that this man had an intense love affair with algae! Over the course of his career, he self-published a series titled Nihon sorui zufu; english tranlsation: Icones of Japanese Algae, which is this week's book of the week. You can thank our partner institution the MBLWHOI Library at Woods Hole, Mass. for this wonderful contribution to our beloved, ever growing digital library. And fret not, if you don’t speak Japanese because Okamura includes all of the taxonomic names and important details in Japanese as well as English. What a champ! If you are ravenous for Okamura’s seminal work, Nihon kaiso zusets or Illustrations of the marine algae of Japan, you won’t lay in wait for too much longer...it has just been digitized at our Internet Archive facility and will be on the BHL shortly.

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  Click through the Flickr Gallery.

5 Fun Algae Facts

Were pretty sure Okamura would want you to know as much about Algae as possible so, that you too might come to appreciate and value its complexity, diversity, and role as a foundational building block in the planet's food chain, i.e., its status as a Primary Producer.

Macrocystis pyrifera*

1) Algae produces about 330 billion tons of oxygen each year.


2) 2.4 billion years ago marks the Great Oxidation Event — the beginning of photosynthesis.  It took another couple hundred million years for enough oxygen to build-up in the atmosphere to support complex life.

3) The earth’s tallest forests are not on land but, in the ocean. Giant kelp forests, Macrocystis pyrifera, can reach 100 meters (328 feet) in height.

4) In the future, algae may become a major source of food and fuel. In fact the Navy is already purchasing algae biofuels.

5) Various types of algae are being studied and used to create anti-cancer drugs.

 

Why should we take care of the ocean, home of our algae friends?

If you aren't already convinced of algae’s vital importance to humankind, last May, in the wake of the devastation caused by the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Barack Obama decreed that the upcoming month of June will be National Oceans Month. Obama wasn’t the first president to understand the vital role that the ocean plays for all Americans:

Among President John F. Kennedy’s many famous quotes were these:

Constantinea rosa-marina

"Knowledge of the oceans is more than a matter of curiosity. Our very survival may hinge upon it.” - John F. Kennedy, Jr., March 1961 message to Congress.

And a year later he said this…

 “All of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea -- whether it is to sail or to watch it -- we are going back from whence we came.”- John F. Kennedy, Jr., September 1962, Speech given at Newport

So in the spirit of JFK, ask not what the ocean can do for you – ask what you can do for the ocean and its algae citizens.

In June, look for more posts about the ocean and the wondrous life contained therein!

Taxonomic Tools 

 Algaebase :: Listing the World's Algae

 MBLWHOI Library :: Digital Herbarium 

*image courtesy of EOL

- Jacqueline Ford, Librarian, Biodiversity Heritage Library

 

BHL and Our Users: Dr. Chris Mah

Meet Dr. Chris Mah, Research Collaborator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. His specialty is starfish, and he's been using BHL in combination with Google Translate to efficiently conduct research involving foreign monographs.

What is your title, institutional affiliation, and area of interest?

Greetings! I am a Research Collaborator in the Invertebrate Zoology Dept. at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. I am one of the world’s only experts in the evolution and classification of starfish (aka sea stars). As a consequence I study a hybrid of taxonomy, paleontology, deep-sea biology and macroevolution as they pertain to asteroids.

How long have you been in your field of study?

Although I received my PhD in 2005, I have been working on starfishes since the late 90s. My first publications were in 1996 and 1998 but most of my pubs came in the early 2000s.

When did you first discover BHL?

I first discovered the BHL when I began my first post-doc at the Smithsonian’s NMNH. Honestly, I think I may have met some of the BHL staff before I actually began using the data from the website.

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

BHL is an awesomely useful resource! As a person who works from a lot of classical taxonomic literature from before the 20th Century, the accessibility of these resources as online PDFs just amazes me. While rooting through old libraries trying to find 200 year old books can be fun, it's often just easier and more time efficient to be able to pull up the document or monograph, download it to my desktop and get to it.

It can also be very helpful to have the BHL when I’m traveling away from “home base.” No need to carry around a rare 120 year old book if you can just open a scanned file of it on your computer. Lots of different situations where this has been a life-saver. Sometimes it happens overseas and sometimes simply at a university or school without a very large library.

How often do you use BHL?

Using BHL is often dictated by need, so sometimes I'm using it every day and other times there are weeks without using it - but if I were to average it out? Maybe once every week or two?

How do you usually use BHL (read the titles online/download whole PDFs/Selecting Pages to Download for a custom PDF/Downloading High Resolution Images/Generating Taxonomic Bibliographies/etc.)

While I haven’t completely explored all of BHL’s tools, I am pretty happy with downloading PDFs of monographs and papers that are either hard to find or just convenient to look up online. Again, as a tool for “taxonomy on the go,” it's nice to be able to access the plates and figures without having to carry along a friable old book on a long trip.

What are your favorite features/services on BHL?

One of my favorite features works best with foreign monographs! You can use the BHL to download content as text, which you can then throw into translation software, such as Google Translate! While this does not always “cleanly” translate it does save a substantial amount of work from having to transcribe the whole thing word by word!

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?

I guess the most important aspect about BHL other than more coverage of older, useful content is a more powerful or at least, smarter search engine. I usually have to take at least two approaches to locating papers among the many journals archived on the BHL. If its not listed under “asteroidea” or some subject word, I usually have to then find the exact citation and track it down.

I realize cross-indexing to that degree is rather difficult and will be imperfect, but sometimes I think that it can be better emphasized when individual monographs are entered into the BHL.

Might also be useful to emphasize how individual citations or pages can be linked with other major biodiversity websites such as the World Asteroidea Database, part of www.marinespecies.org, and so on..

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?

Scans of the older content in the BHL are probably the most meaningful to my research. These often represent rarely circulated monographs and books that I often don’t find outside of the main “hub” libraries. It is my hope that more of these rarities can be scanned and made available to everyone...and that they can be better advertised so that researchers around the world can tap into them.

_____________________________________________________

Thank you so much, Dr. Mah, for taking the time to share your experiences with BHL with us! We're pleased to announce that recently BHL implemented new search functionality, allowing for more Google-like, fuzzy search matching. Rather than having to enter exact citations, users can now submit keyword combinations (and even title abbreviations!) to retrieve results from BHL. Hopefully, this will make your research much more efficient, and we look forward to continually improving these features in the months to come.

JSTOR Early Journal Content in BHL

BHL is pleased to announce that a selection of JSTOR’s Early Journal Content (EJC) relevant to biodiversity is now available in BHL’s citation repository, Citebank.

In the fall of 2011, JSTOR announced they were making their journal content published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world. This spring BHL has worked to ingest nearly 30,000 articles from JSTOR’s EJC into Citebank so that they may be searched alongside other biodiversity-related materials. Once a citation is retrieved, users will be taken to the JSTOR website where they can view the original content files.

The presence of JSTOR’s EJC greatly increases the value of the Citebank repository by providing access to articles from significant biodiversity materials published during this period.

Happy Birthday BHL!

BHL at launch in May, 2007

Like proud parents, we're excited to announce that today BHL turns 5 years old! In 2007, the Biodiversity Heritage Library portal was launched with 306 titles, 3,236 volumes, and 1,271,664 pages of taxonomic literature, presented via a simple portal bathed in earthy tones. What began as a consortium of just 10 natural history and botanical libraries has today grown into a global project, with 14 US/UK consortium members as well as BHL nodes on every continent in the world except Antarctica.

Today, BHL includes:

• Over 55,000 titles, 105,000 volumes, and 38.6 million pages
• New and improved portal with updated colors, enhanced user-interface, and more Google-like, user-friendly searching
• New logo
• The ability to create your own PDF and download high-resolution images of BHL content
• The ability to generate bibliographies for specific species
• 13,048,166 BHL pages linking to EOL species pages, as well as 1,284,930 EOL species pages linking to BHL
• An advanced feedback system allowing staff to collect and promptly respond to user-submitted comments about content in BHL
• Scanning Request process to allow users to nominate material to be scanned for BHL
• Improved communication with users, including an active presence on our blog, Twitter, and Facebook
• Our spectacular Flickr account, featuring over 30,000 amazing natural history illustrations and projects in place to improve access to BHL images through the BHL portal
• Integration of our social media outreach into our portal, including the ability to tweet or post to Facebook directly within BHL
• Specialized collections of content within BHL, allowing users to explore our materials in a curated manner, including our extremely popular Charles Darwin's Library collection
• The ability to add BHL titles directly to a Mendeley account
• The Biodiversity Heritage Library on iTunes U, allowing users to access select BHL content within iTunes and download to their iPod Touch, iPad, or iPhone
• The BHL public wiki - a one-stop shop for information about our project, FAQs, copyright policies, tutorials, and more
• New BHL Newsletter
• New BHL Quarterly Reports to keep users informed about project progress
• Active staff that regularly present about BHL at conferences and publish papers about our project
• BHL nodes in Australia, Europe, China, Egypt, and Brazil, with discussions underway to create a BHL for Sub-Saharan Africa
• Recognition as one of the top twelve free reference tools of 2011 by Library Journal

These are just a few of the improvements we've made to BHL since it was born in 2007. Take a look at what BHL used to look like through the Internet Archive's Way Back Machine. We're proud of the progress we've made and look forward to the next five years. We're expecting big things!

Book of the Week: Hawaii’s Natural Treasures

If you didn’t already know, we are in the midst of celebrating Asian-Pacific American Heritage month, which asks us to honor the people, culture, history and biodiversity of a broad region which encompasses the entire Asian continent and the Pacific islands of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. This region includes exciting and exotic locales such as Palau, Guam, Fiji, New Zealand, Hawaiian Islands, Tonga, and Easter Island just to name a few.

Today we are focusing our attention on our 50^th state, Hawaii, a place synonymous with paradise. While many of us longingly pine for Hawaii’s beaches and temperate weather during the cruel months of midwinter, we should also take care to remember that Hawaii’s history is an intimate part of the American experience. Key moments in Hawaii’s recent history such as becoming a state in 1959, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, or even Captain Cook’s discovery of the “Sandwich Islands,” are important but, these events often overshadow Hawaii’s natural history which asks us to delve a little deeper into the past. This is a story that begins with the formation of the archipelago chain of eight major islands, followed by the myriad ways in which plants and animals came to these islands and eventually how the native people populated and lived in peace on these islands for hundreds of years prior to European contact.

Enthusiastic naturalist, professor and curator at the Bishop Museum, William Alanson Bryan seeks to tell this story in a tome that he called his “life’s work”. Bryan’s Natural history of Hawaii, being an account of the Hawaiian people, the geology and geography of the islands, and the native and introduced plants and animals of the group is just three years shy of its 100-year publication anniversary yet, the work is still a relevant and comprehensive guide through Hawaii’s natural wonders. More importantly it painstakingly documents Hawaii’s biodiversity in a central place which provides modern conservationists with a roadmap of Hawaiian species they should be working to preserve --but more on that subject later.

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Bryan’s tome is as lengthy as the title suggests. However, the 596 page text is sprinkled with 441 photos, mostly shot by Bryan himself. The book is a visual journey. The key to navigating its contents is by consulting the extensive cross-referenced index and glossary at the back of the book which, gives the reader the common, taxonomic and Hawaiian names for various species found throughout the island chain. Furthermore, this book serves as an important access point for budding taxonomists, systematists, zoologists, and even the novice student. In fact, it is the uninterested and unenlightened person that Bryan takes special pains to reach. His book provides the reader with a holistic understanding of Hawaii’s natural treasures that is broad enough for the beginner while still providing enough taxonomic depth for specialists. For natural history lovers, particular emphasis should be paid to Part II of the book which, contains chapters on birds, fish, insects (native and invasive), mollusks, and all manner of reef-dwelling creature.

Another reason to highlight this book, beyond this month’s celebrations is for a slightly less cheerful reason. As a frequent visitor to the islands myself, I quickly noticed that many of locals are in the habit of calling their beloved islands “the extinction capital of the United States.” Put simply: no where on earth is biodiversity loss happening at such alarming rates as it is in Hawaii. Tourism, invasive species and climate change have created steep challenges for Hawaii’s biodiversity task force. Some staggering statistics to wrap your mind around:

-        Sea levels will rise by 2.5-6.2 feet by 2050, which will reduce Hawaii’s access to fresh water tables dramatically.

-   Overfishing, sedimentation, land-based pollution, recreational overuse and invasive species jeopardize the health of Hawaii’s reefs and have resulted in a 75% decline in near-shore reef fish populations over the past century.

-       A new pest species arrives in the islands about once every 18 days; these invasive species are decimating Hawaii’s delicate ecology and costing the state half a billion dollars annually.

-(Statistics provided by the Nature Conservancy. More statistics here.)

Trae Menard, director of the Kauai Program for the Nature Conservancy informs us that "Hawaii is a model for the future of what is going to happen elsewhere around the globe. Who knows what we are really in for....What we learn to make our ecosystems more resilient is going to be valuable globally.” We must help Hawaii preserve its natural treasures so that the life forms that Bryan spent his life describing still maintain the right to live, grow, reproduce and be appreciated as valuable members in the chain of life. You can contribute by simply biking or walking to work (reduces greenhouse emissions, and keeps sea levels from rising), participating in global bioblitzes, or if you are feeling really ambitious volunteer with the Nature Conservancy or other local efforts in Hawaii.

Further Reading and Citations

Natural history of Hawaii, being an account of the Hawaiian people, the geology and geography of the islands, and the native and introduced plants and animals of the group

Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month

48 Kaua‘i Species Protected Under Endangered Species Act

Kilauea: Mountain of Fire, Hawaii's Vulnerable Biodiversity

Kauai Invasive Species Committee

The Nature Conservancy: Hawaii


- Jacqueline Ford, Librarian, Biodiversity Heritage Library

Announcing the BHL Newsletter!

Want to keep up with all the latest BHL project updates? Then subscribe to our quarterly newsletter! It's full of great information about all the fun things BHL is doing. The Spring 2012 newsletter (excerpt below) highlights the retirement of BHL's founding director, Tom Garnett, our recent iTunes U collections, our NEH grant to support improved access to BHL images, and our shared booth with EOL at the American Libraries Association midwinter meeting.

Click here to subscribe to the BHL Newsletter.

Newsletters will be archived on our public wiki.

Partying with BHL: Tagging Flickr Images for EOL

BHL has over 38 million pages of taxonomic literature, freely available worldwide to anyone with an Internet connection. But if you think BHL is just about text, you'll be pleasantly surprised. BHL books also contain thousands of gorgeous natural history illustrations from the past 500 years. We wanted to provide better access to these images, and thus the BHL Flickr was born. BHL's Flickr currently contains more than 30,000 images.

The Encyclopedia of Life, with which BHL is closely associated, is an online encyclopedia dedicated to creating a web page for every species on earth. These pages contain information about each species, links to mentions of those species in BHL, distribution maps, and a myriad of media, including images. EOL harvests many of their images from Flickr, including BHL images that are tagged with a species name machine tag. See an example of an EOL species page with a BHL image here.

Machine tags are tags specially formatted to allow machines to read and understand them. For EOL, these tags tell machines which species (or other taxonomic designations) are depicted in each image. The format for EOL machine tags is "taxonomy:binomial=Genus species". You can replace "binomial" with another taxonomic tag, such as "genus" or "family", if you can only identify the organism at that level. Learn more about the Flickr tagging process and machine tag formats in our previous blog post. 

While BHL is working on ways to automatically add species tags to images in Flickr (learn more in the post about our recent NEH grant), the process is currently a manual one, requiring users to identify the species in each image with a taxonomic machine tag so that it can be ingested into EOL and associated with the correct species page. With over 30,000 images in the BHL Flickr, staff need help to get these images tagged. To facilitate this process, staff decided to call on the power of the masses and host a Flickr tagging party at the Smithsonian Institution.

The Flickr Tagging Party at the Smithsonian Institution.

Smithsonian employees were invited to gather on April 25th, 2012, for a 1 1/2 hour meeting at which BHL and EOL staff gave overviews of their respective projects and instructions on how to add taxonomic machine tags to BHL images. After a brief tutorial (see the tutorial on the EOL Flickr page), guests were encouraged to begin tagging images from a prepared list of books. Users run into a variety of challenges when tagging images, including outdated species names (users are encouraged to tag images with more modern names), plates without species names, and names in foreign languages or in fonts that are difficult to read, among other things. While the books identified on the prepared list were selected to minimize these difficulties, attendees nevertheless unavoidably encountered many of these issues. Thus, BHL and EOL staff were positioned throughout the room to provide assistance when needed.

The tagging party was an overall success and excellent learning opportunity for both guests and staff. Approximately 170 images were tagged by the 23 attendees. A slightly high tag error rate has prompted staff to refine instructions and develop a simpler format for future events. Additionally, a survey was sent to attendees to allow staff to identify further areas for improvement.

Staff hope to host many more of these events. Incorporating changes based on lessons learned during this first attempt, several more staff parties are planned for the coming months. Later this summer, staff plan to host an event for a natural history society in the Washington, D.C. area before finally hosting the first public tagging party, most likely stationed at the Smithsonian Institution. If you're interested in learning more about tagging Flickr images or perhaps participating in future public events, send us feedback. Be sure to check back on our blog regularly for more information about Flickr, EOL, and machine tags!

Visit the BHL Flickr page here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary/sets/