This is the second in a 4 part joint blog series by the Field Book Project (FBP) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), showcasing examples of digital connections between museum specimens, field book catalog records, and the resulting publications.

Documentation and specimens from expeditions often end up separated when participants return to their home institutions. The materials’ connections are sometimes inconsistently recorded. Resulting publications can suffer the same fate. These blog posts are snapshots of how these materials are being reunited virtually, through the ongoing work of BHL, FBP, and National Museum of Natural History (NMNH).

The first example of this online reunion is the Biological Survey of Panama, 1910- 1912. This was an amazing survey, conducted before the completion of the Panama Canal. Panama had not yet been fully surveyed; scientists recognized the potential lost opportunity, if the country was not studied before the Canal irrevocably altered the landscape. Smithsonian and affiliated staff who worked on the survey also developed an ongoing interest in the area as a site for long term collecting and research. This eventually resulted in a relationship with the research station on Barro Colorado Island, now known as Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Yet, if one looks for publications from this important survey, frequently one must read a portion of text to find the relationship.

When cataloging field books that result from an expedition, the Field Book Project creates an Enhanced Encoded Archival Context catalog record to describe the expedition. The records are designed to provide official and variant names for a survey, major dates, participants, locations, and overall description of work completed. Details vary depending on available information. These specifics enable researchers to locate publications, field notes, and images of specimens collected during an expedition, even though the connection is not always explicitly stated in records.

By knowing who collected, where, and when, we were able to find records for field notes, publications, and specimens for the Survey of the Panama Canal. The Field Book Project’s item level cataloging facilitated the location of field notes from 5 of the 8 leading participants–several of whom were not employees of the US National Museum. We found several examples of digitized publications from original collectors in BHL, in spite of the fact they sometimes appeared a decade after the fieldwork occurred. These details also enabled the locating specimen images, like the one pictured above.

This is by no means an exhaustive search, but the ease with which these were found is heartening. Resources from expeditions like this are frequently documented only in paper or institutional memory. Publications out of copyright have the chance of being digitized by one of several institutions, but the online presence and availability of specimens and field notes (by nature of their uniqueness) requires additional care, time, and expense that many institutions may not have available. We at the Field Book Project are proud to demonstrate how these pieces can be reconnected online. Stay tuned for more expedition highlights.

Tagging BHL Marine Images at the Smithsonian

There are approximately 32,000 species of fish, representing the greatest species diversity of any vertebrate group. Mollusks, with around 85,000 extant species, constitute the largest marine phylum and about 23% of all named marine organisms. Crustaceans, with about 67,000 described species, are arthropods that range in size from .004 inches (Stygotantulus stocki) to over 12.5 feet (Japanese Spider Crab). The diverse algae group includes unicellular and multicellular organisms, such as seaweeds, dinoflagellates, red, green, brown, yellow and golden algae, and diatoms, to name a few.

Looking at the big picture, we know of over 210,000 marine species, though it is estimated that there are more than one million in total. It should come as no surprise to you that BHL has millions of pages of literature related to the topic of marine biodiversity. What you may not know is that we also have thousands of images of marine species in our Flickr.

We’ve written before about our mission to add species name tags to the images in our Flickr account so that users can not only search for and find illustrations of specific organisms, but also so that we can easily share these images with external projects like the Encyclopedia of Life. To accomplish this goal, we’ve not only created instructional material and encouraged our user community to take up the charge, but we’ve also hosted two tagging parties at the Smithsonian Libraries. On April 2, 2013, we hosted our third tagging party at the Smithsonian, in conjunction with both the Encyclopedia of Life and Smithsonian’s Ocean Portal. This time, we focused our event on a theme: Marine Biodiversity.

Attendees at the Tagging Party, adding tags! Photo by Gilbert Borrego.

At our tagging parties, we invite Smithsonian staff, including curators, volunteers, interns, fellows, and librarians, to gather in person for an hour and a half to help us add tags to images in a group setting. Since this was a themed event, we directed attendees to specific sets of marine images in need of tagging. We’re happy to say that the 17 people that attended the party made some good headway on the thousands of marine images that need tagging!

You can Help!

As mentioned, all of our tagging events thus far have been staff-only occasions. While we hope to hold public events in the future, hosted at various BHL member institutions, you can actually help us tag our images right now!

How?

If you’re looking at an image in Flickr for which you know the species name, simply click “add a tag” and input the name in the following format:

Taxonomy:Binomial=”Genus species”

Replace the “Genus Species” text with the actual binomial for the creature you are identifying and be sure to put quotation marks around the name as shown above. So, a complete tag would look like:

Taxonomy:Binomial=”Zea mays”

How can you identify the species if you don’t recognize it on sight? Many of our illustrations actually have the species name printed on the image itself. Simply transcribe that name into the machine tag format. If the name isn’t printed on the illustration, you may be able to find an identification in BHL. Click on the link below each image to view the book in BHL, then navigate through the text pages surrounding the image to see if the species identification is given. If so, input the name into the machine tag format in Flickr.

Example of an image with a machine tag and the link to that image in BHL. Click this image to enlarge.

Every image that is tagged with a species name machine tag will automatically be added to the BHL Collection in EOL and associated with the corresponding EOL species page.

Need more help? Check out the Tagging Instructions composed by the Encyclopedia of Life, send us feedback, post a comment on this blog, or write to us at [email protected]. We’d also love to hear from you about your experience adding tags and/or suggestions for making our instructional materials or process better!