BHL and the Missouri Botanical Garden are pleased to announce a major milestone reached in the project, “Purposeful Gaming and BHL”. Dartmouth College’s Tiltfactor was chosen to design the game that will help improve access to texts from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL).

The Purposeful Gaming and BHL project is based at the Missouri Botanical Garden (MOBOT) in St Louis, Missouri. In the fall of 2013, MOBOT was awarded a $449,641 grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to test new means of using crowdsourcing and gaming to support the enhancement of texts from the BHL. Grant funding began in December 2013 and ends in December 2015. The Garden is partnering with Harvard University, Cornell University and the New York Botanical Garden on the project.

Principal Investigator for the project, Trish Rose-Sandler, reports that the project received “several strong bids for the design of the game so it wasn’t an easy decision. We are very excited to have found a great partner for this project because the game will be the critical component to improving access to digitized texts of the BHL.” The project’s goal is to demonstrate whether or not online games are a successful tool for analyzing and improving digital outputs. Users will be presented words that are difficult for software to recognize as tasks in a game.

User engages with Zen Tag, one of Tiltfactor’s games available via the Metadata Games platform.

Tiltfactor had several strengths that made their bid stand out, including extensive experience designing games for the education sector. “We were also impressed that not only do they design games but they do extensive research into the impact of those designs on players from a psychological perspective – they even have two social psychologists on their design team,” states Rose-Sander. Tiltfactor’s greatest strength, however, is arguably their work with crowdsourcing metadata as demonstrated in their Metadata Games platform, which entices players to engage with and help improve access to archival content found in cultural heritage institutions.

The folks at Tiltfactor were interested in bidding on the project for several reasons. “The ‘Purposeful Gaming and BHL’ initiative extends our work with metadata games creation to bring in the public to meaningfully participate in our nation’s robust archives,” states Tiltfactor’s founding director, Dr. Mary Flanagan. “Games can be harnessed to provide fun experiences that also improve transcription and make bioheritage accessible to many more people. Tiltfactor is thrilled to work with BHL and their partners on an endeavor with such a high social return.”

The two teams will begin working collaboratively on the design of the game in July of 2014, and it is expected that the game will be released publicly sometime in early summer of 2015.

To learn more about project details see http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Purposeful+Gaming.

This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services [LG-05-13-0352-13].

On 17 June 2014, a visiting delegation of librarians from across Russia visited Smithsonian Libraries and our BHL operations. Coming from a wide variety of institutions in Russia, the group was particularly interested in digitization and digitization workflow.

Smithsonian Libraries (SIL) Deputy Director Mary Augusta Thomas provided a welcome and general overview of Smithsonian Libraries to the group and the SIL Associate Director and BHL Program Director discussed Smithsonian and BHL digital initiatives.

The highlight for the group, however, was their visit to the SIL scanning room in the National Museum of Natural History where they met with Jackie Chapman (SIL BHL Librarian) and discussed BHL and pan-BHL scanning operations.

The visitors and their institutions were:

• Ms. Iulia Maratovna GABIDULLINA
  American Center Coordinator, Perm Krai Library n.a. Gorky, Perm
• Ms. Sofia Alekseevna KOCHERGINA Jr.
  American Shelf Coordinator, St. Petersburg
• Ms. Olga Yurievna MAKAROVA Sr.
  Director, Central City Public Library ‘Chitay-Gorod, ‘ Novgorod Velikiy
• Mr. Kirill Arkadyevich SAMARKIN
  Library Manager, Moscow City Library Center
• Mr. Sergey Gennadievich SOLOVEV
  Acting Director, Vladivostok Centralized Library System, Vladivostok
• Ms. Nadezhda Yurievna VALIAEVA
  Chief Librarian, Library of American Literature, Nizhegorodskiy State Linguistic University n.a. Dobrolyubov, Nizhniy Novgorod
• Mr. Renat Bulatovich ZAKIROV
  Deputy Director, Automation, Moscow City Library Center
• Mr. Alexandr Ivanovich KUNIN
  Department Head, Center of Comics and Visual Culture, Russian State Library for Youth

Once an amazing diversity of birds–some in breathtaking abundance–inhabited the vast forests and plains of North America. But starting around 1600, some species began to disappear, as humans altered habitats, over-hunted, and introduced predators.

A notable extinction occurred 100 years ago, with the death of Martha the Passenger Pigeon, the last member of a species that once filled America’s skies.  The story of the last Passenger Pigeon and the disappearance of the Great Auk, Carolina Parakeet, and Heath Hen reveal the fragile connections between species and their environment.

To help tell their story, the Smithsonian Libraries, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and the National Museum of Natural History have curated a joint exhibit entitled Once There Were Billions: Vanished Birds of North America that will open June 24 in the National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C.  Over the next several weeks, we’ll be highlighting each of the four birds with content from the exhibit and illustrations found in BHL.

Naturgeschichte der Vögel Mitteleuropas [Natural history of birds of Central Europe] Johann Andreas Naumann et al. Gera-Untermhaus, Germany: F.E. Köhler, 1897–1905 http://biodiversitylibrary.org/item/108804#page/219/mode/1up

Great Auk: Flightless, Social … and Doomed
The Great Auk (Pinguinus impennis) once lived in large, dense colonies along North Atlantic shores. Clumsy and flightless on land, they were perfectly adapted to “fly” underwater, with their small wings and streamlined bodies.

Extinct Birds. Walter Rothschild London: Hutchinson, 1907 Plate 38, Alca impennishttp://biodiversitylibrary.org/ page/38665797#page/367/mode/1up

The caption for this image of the Great Auk gives its old scientific name, Alca impennis. Now termed Pinguinus impennis, the auk may look penguin-like, but it is related to the puffin. Great Auks mated for life nesting in crowded colonies on rocky islands. Females laid one egg per year on bare rock, and both parents took turns incubating the egg.

Unfortunately, they could not flee human predators.  Hunters slaughtered Auks by the thousands for meat, eggs, feathers, and oil. Once the bird’s numbers dwindled precipitously, naturalists hurried to add them as specimens to their collections before they disappeared forever.  By the mid-1800s the species went extinct–the final result of centuries of human exploitation.

What can be done to prevent future extinctions? One way is to support researchers who seek a better understanding of the biodiversity of this planet.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a global project that is changing the way research is done, by digitizing and sharing biodiversity literature online. BHL makes more than 43 million pages and nearly 100,000 scientific illustrations–of animals and plants, living and extinct–freely available to scientists and others around the world.

The Great Auk is documented in over 3,000 pages of the literature found in the BHL corpus. BHL relies on donations from individuals to support scanning of the biodiversity literature held in some of the world’s most renowned natural history and botanical libraries.  To learn more about how your donation supports the continued growth of BHL, please visit http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs181/1103622715135/archive/1115465985290.html. We hope you’ll consider making a contribution today!

Patricia Mergen at Smithsonian Libraries

Dr. Patricia Mergen, Liaison Officer,  Legal Entity Appointed Representative (LEAR) at the European Commission, Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium, visited the BHL Secretariat and Smithsonian Libraries on 31 May 2014.

Mergen was in Washington to attend the Catalogue of Life Workshop and  Symposium (2-4 June 2014). In discussions with Program Director Martin Kalfatovic and Program Manager Carolyn Sheffield, Mergen gave updates on activities of BHL Europe and upcoming European biodiversity initiatives, including the Horizon 2020 programme. There were also updates from Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) of which Mergen is the Secretary.

Dr. Abel Packer, head of BHL SciELO (Brazil) also stopped by between the Society for Scholarly Publishing 2014 meeting (in Boston) and other work in Philadelphia. Packer gave updates on the work being done to upload BHL SciELO content to the BHL portal. As planned host for the 2015 Global BHL meeting, Packer outlined some ideas that will be presented to the Global Steering Committee.

On May 28, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) co-hosted an evening program on digital volunteerism.  The event was organized by The Smithsonian Associates (TSA) and was attended by 74 people.

Jen Hammock presenting at the Smithsonian Associates program

Carolyn Sheffield (BHL), Katja Schulz (EOL), and Jen Hammock (EOL) presented on BHL, EOL, and examples of how people could contribute to growing our knowledge of the planet’s biodiversity.  Presentations were followed by a hands-on session where attendees were encouraged to start machine tagging images in BHL’s Flickr Photostream, cropping and rating images, and exploring the iNaturalist platform.

BHL has hosted similar events in the past for Smithsonian staff to learn about–and add–machine tags to the images in BHL’s Flickr Photostream.  A machine tag is a tag that is structured in such a way that a machine can read and understand it. In our case, we’re assigning machine tags of scientific names to the BHL illustrations in Flickr so that EOL can recognize those as images that can be harvested and associated with the appropriate species page in EOL.  See an example of an EOL species page with a BHL image here:

EOL species page for Magnolia hodgsonii with illustration from BHL’s Flickr photostream

The structure that we use for the 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 the instructions we provided to session attendees.

Katja Schulz working with some of the TSA attendees

The TSA event was not only an opportunity to expand our cadre of machine taggers but also gave us a chance to share multiple ways that people could get involved with BHL and EOL. For example, images that depict multiple species can create confusion when associated with a single species page in EOL.  Attendees were shown how to replace such images with a cropped version showing only the relevant species.  The evening also provided a chance to showcase EOL’s recently launched iNaturalist Collections.

All told, it was a very successful event.  Several guests said they were delighted to learn about EOL and BHL and, by the end of the day, 129 more images in BHL’s Flickr Photostream boasted machine tags.  We look forward to the continued contributions of these amazing Smithsonian Associates session attendees!

Looking for a way that you can get involved?
Check out the instructions on machine tagging or visit EOL to sign up for an account and to learn more about recording your own observations of the natural world through EOL’s iNaturalist collections.