As the weather in Central New York is getting colder, and the winter is inevitably approaching, I can’t help but recall the humid summer of Washington, DC. Over the summer of 2016, I interned at Smithsonian Libraries. As a summer intern, I worked at the Department of Digital Programs and Initiatives on the “Cataloging across collections” project. The project was focused on metadata and cataloging. During my internship I worked on digital curation of the records in Biodiversity Heritage Library as well as cataloging field notes for the Field Book Project. Both aspects of my internship were coordinated by mentors assigned by the Smithsonian Libraries – Bianca Crowley, Digital Collections Manager of Biodiversity Heritage Library, and Lesley Parilla, Cataloging Coordinator of the Field Book Project. During my internship I met with Smithsonian Institution staff members, toured different departments, attended the staff picnic, and, most importantly, improved my understanding of the technical services in libraries.

Although working on metadata projects was quite challenging, it helped me to gain confidence as an information professional. As a librarian, I’ve always known that the information organization is important, but I didn’t realize how much properly maintained bibliographic descriptions can improve the user experience. Especially, when the audience can only interact with online assets. Biodiversity Heritage Library is a unique digital collection of the resources in Natural Sciences. My work focused on editing metadata for existing records, which included author merging, editing of volume information, title merging, and linking of the serial records. I received training in 2 internal systems, the Gemini Issue Tracker and BHL Administrative Dashboard to work on these tasks.

On the first week of my internship, I needed to link several volumes together. “Den Norske Nordhavs-expedition, 1876-1878” gives an account of the Norwegian North-Atlantic expedition in the 19th century, commanded by Carl Fredrik Wille, Captain of the Royal Navy. Since I have interest in Scandinavian languages, I enjoyed interacting with this resource. This and many other assignments throughout my internship taught me the importance of metadata standards. Seeing both librarian and user perspectives on the information-retrieval systems became an eye-opening experience for me.

 

“Den Norske Nordhavs-expedition, 1876-1878”, bd. 5, pt. 17 [Alcyonida], tab. I

“Den Norske Nordhavs-expedition, 1876-1878”, bd. 5, pt. 17 [Alcyonida], tab.

Further into my internship, I was trained to upload the scanned images into the Internet Archive, the platform that hosts the BHL assets. I used another internal system, Macaw, for this purpose. As I was uploading the new images, I assigned page-level metadata. One of the publications I was working with was Bonn Zoological Bulletin. I had so much fun working on the metadata-level description of William Mann’s scrapbook from his trip to South East Asia for the Field Book Project. One of my favorite serials was Canadian Forest Industries, a magazine that was renamed at least 6 times before its current title. While I was adding volume information and page level metadata, I encountered amazing illustrations and advertisement campaigns from Florists’ Review, that is a wonderful compilation of the marketing tools of the past.

Canadian Forest Industries, formerly known as Canadian Lumberman, Jan 1903.

Drawing from the Florists’ Review April 1913 v.31 no.797 (801) p.17

Front page of from the Florists’ Review December 1922, Christmas edition v. 51 no.1306

In addition to learning many essential skills for technical services in libraries, during my internship I worked with Camtasia software. Screen-casting was used to develop tutorials for BHL Staff about working in the BHL “Admin Dash.” I recorded one video that focused on merging author records together. During the internship I also presented at a Brown Bag presentation in front of Smithsonian Libraries staff, my mentors, and other interns.

I would like to express gratitude to my mentors – Bianca Crowley, Digital Collections Manager at Biodiversity Heritage Library, and Lesley Parilla, Cataloging Coordinator of the Field Book Project, and the entire Department of Digital Programs and Initiatives for their guidance and support. I would also like to thank LIS Program Director at Syracuse University – Jill Hurst-Wahl, and my Academic Advisor – Barbara Stripling, for their invaluable insights on the US library system. My boundless gratitude goes to Cultural Vistas and the Edmund S. Muskie Internship Program that made it possible for me to intern in Washington, D.C. during the summer of 2016. Being a part of the Smithsonian Institution was an unforgettable life experience, which I will proudly carry with me throughout my library career!

Official Photo by Denisse Vargas

The 2016 TDWG Biodiversity Information Standards meeting was held at the Centro de Transferencia Tecnológica y Educación Continua (CTEC) in San Carlos, Costa Rica. Hotels and other activities were in La Fortuna, about a 45 minute bus ride from CTEC.

BHL was represented at the TDWG 2016 conference with a symposium, “BHL: 10 Years of Innovation and Growth”. The panel consisted of:

Constance Rinaldo

• BHL – 10 Years and More! (Martin R. Kalfatovic)
• BHL: Grants and Growth (Constance Rinaldo)
• BHL-SciELO Network (Henrique Rodrigues)
• Towards extracting occurrence data from biodiversity literature (Dmitry Schigel)
• Questions: BHL – 10 years of innovation & growth (Discussion led by Constance Rinaldo)

The session was attended by about 70 people. The conclusion of the session was a discussion with the audience about desires for the future direction of BHL and features or services that could be implemented as BHL explores refactoring the BHL platform. Among the topics mentioned by the audience were: integration of visual resources in BHL and expanding in-copyright material.

Dimitris Koureas, Cynthia Parr, Erick Mata

The TDWG organizers, led by the program committee – Dr. Erick Mata Montero (Professor, School of Computing, Costa Rica Institute of Technology); Gail Kampmeier (Prairie Research Institute, Illinois Natural History Survey, University of Illinois, USA); Francisco (“Paco”) Pando (Real Jardín Botánico-CSIC, Spain); Maria Mora Instituto (Nacional de Biodiversidad, Costa Rica); Joel Sachs (Agriculture and Agri-Food, Canada); Manuel Vargas (Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad, Costa Rica); Stan Blum (ex-officio TDWG Coordinator); and William Ulate (ex-officio TDWG Treasurer, Missouri Botanical Garden) – delivered an excellent program.

The keynote, by Dr. Rodrigo Gámez Lobo (founder and former Director General and President of the National Biodiversity Institute) explored the future of Costa Rican biodiversity as exemplified in his work On Biodiversity, People and Utopias (1999). His talk addressed the theme of this work, in which he states, “Our real goal is to make the society come to the understanding that, because of being something that directly affects quality of life, materially, intellectually and spiritually, we must preserve at all costs the rich biodiversity of the country”.

Former BHL Technical Director William Ulate led a symposium on Semantics for Biodiversity Science: Challenges & Solutions. Ulate and co-author Riza Batista-Navarro spoke on “Real use cases for Semantic Information from the Mining Biodiversity project.”

Another important symposium was Semantics for Biodiversity Science: Text Mining & Semantic Role Tagging. Key papers included:

• Enhancing semantic search through the automatic construction of a Biodiversity Terminological Inventory (Nhung T.H. Nguyen, Georgios Kontonatsios, Axel J. Soto, Riza Batista-Navarro, Sophia Ananiadou)
• Geographic entities extraction from biological textual sources (Moisés Alberto Acuña-Chaves)

Another symposium of note was Semantics for Biodiversity Science: Taxon Names & Traits. Key papers included:

• What’s in a name? Sense and reference in digital biodiversity information (Joakim Philipson)
• Creating computable definitions for clades using the Web Ontology Language (OWL) (Gaurav Vaidya, Hilmar Lapp, Nico Cellinese)

• Reviewing data integration and mobilisation using name reconciliation and identifier services (Nicky Nicolson, Robert Turner, Abigail Barker)
•  Implementing Name Identifiers for the World Flora Online (Chuck Miller)
• Identifiers for Biodiversity Informatics: The Global Names Approach (Dmitry Y. Mozzherin, Richard Pyle)
• The Catalogue of Life Editor’s View on Globally Unique Identifiers for Names (Yuri Roskov)
• Names and identifiers in the CyVerse cyberinfrastucture (Ramona L. Walls)
• Utilizing Unique Identifiers for Taxonomic Concepts (Jeff Gerbracht)

Two papers of interest in the contributed papers session were  a historical review of TDWG and a paper  describing a new publishing practice that relies on extraction of highly relevant details (species descriptions, for example) from longer publications.

• TDWG Then and Now (Arturo H. Ariño, Anabel Pérez de Zabalza)
• Nanopublications for biodiversity: concept, formats and implementation (Lyubomir Penev, Éamonn Ó Tuama, Viktor Senderov, Pavel Stoev, Teodor Georgiev)

Volcán Arenal

A highlight of the meeting was the TDWG 2016 Bioblitz at the nearby Texas A&M; Soltis Center. The bioblitz helped to create a biodiversity snapshot of TDWG 2016. Participants were encouraged to take the opportunity to observe and to post their pictures of local biodiversity. The event took place in a torrential rainstorm, but the event still provided some observations and camaraderie.

There were other opportunities to see some of Costa Rica’s amazing biodiversity, among those sighted were:

Two-toed Sloth (Choloepus hoffmanni)

Mammals

• Three-toed Sloth (Bradypus variegatus)
• Two-toed Sloth (Choloepus hoffmanni)
• White-nosed Coati (Nasua narica)
• Mantled Howler Monkey (Alouatta palliata)
• Spider Monkey (Ateles geoffroyi)
• White-throated Capuchin (Cebus capucinus)
• Long-nosed bat (Rhynchonycteris naso)

Yellow-throated Toucan (Ramphastos ambiguus)

Birds

• Wood Stork (Mycteria americana)
• Little Blue Heron (Egretta caerulea)
• Cattle Egret (Bubulcus ibis)
• Snowy Egret (Egretta thula)
• Northern Jacana (Jacana spinosa)
• Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura)
• Groove-billed Ani (Crotophaga sulcirostris)
• Yellow-throated Toucan (Ramphastos ambiguus)
• Green Kingfisher (Chloroceryle americana)
• Anhinga (Anhinga anhinga)
• White Ibis (Eudocimus albus)
• Boat-billed Heron (Cochlearius cochlearius)

American Crocodile (Crocodylus acutus)

Reptiles

• Spectacled Caiman (Caiman crocodilus)
• American Crocodile (Crocodylus acutus)
• Emerald Basilisk (Basiliscus plumifrons)
• Black River Turtle (Rhinoclemmys funerea)
• Common Snapping Turtle (Chelydra serpentina)
• Green Iguana (Iguana iguana)

So far, EABL has secured permission for 106 in-copyright titles and added 59 new contributors to BHL. The EABL collection holds 3,428 volumes from 289 titles, containing 377,924 pages. Important titles (some of which have not yet been scanned) include:

• Zoologica: Scientific Contributions of the New York Zoological Society
• Roosevelt Wild Life Bulletin and Roosevelt Wild Life Annals
• Entomologica Americana
• Wilson Journal of Ornithology
• Journal of Arachnology
• North American Birds
• Kirtlandia
• Journal of the New York Entomological Society
• Journal of Raptor Research
• Memoirs of the Southern California Academy of Sciences
• Arnoldia
• The Green Scene
• Transactions of the Worcester County Horticultural Society

In-copyright titles added by BHL

For more information about EABL, please visit the wiki, where you will find an up-to-date list of digitized titles, a list of presentations given about the project, related blog posts, and the EABL Twitter feed.

Get Involved

EABL will receive new content through the fall of 2017. If you know of a publication or institution that you would like to see represented in BHL and DPLA, please contact EABL Community Manager Patrick Randall at [email protected] or Principal Investigator Susan Fraser at [email protected]. If you would like funding for digitization, please fill out the EABL interest survey.

Night-blowing (Blooming) Cereus (Selenicereus grandiflorus). Curtis’s Botanical Magazine. v. 62 (1835). http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/465887. Digitized by the Missouri Botanical Garden, Peter H. Raven Library.

‘Queen of the dark, whose tender glories fade
In the gay radiance of the noon-tide hours.’

‘That flower, supreme in loveliness, and pure
As the pale Cynthia’s beams, through which unveiled
It blooms, as if unwilling to endure
The gaze, by which such beauties are assailed.’

These elegant lines are quoted in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine (v. 62, 1835) as part of the description for the Night-blowing (Blooming) Cereus (Selenicereus grandiflorus) and serve as an artful conveyance of the species’ nocturnal blooming. But these lines represent more than just a whimsical representation of plant behavior. They are a reflection of the eighteenth century Poetic Botany movement that saw botany become the subject of poetry.

The Poetic Botany movement began with Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin, who, in 1789, published The Loves of the Plants, a poem that in essence was a versification of Linnaean botany, where each plant in the garden is personified as a Greek god or goddess whose characteristics and interactions are meant to elucidate the Linnaean sexual system of plant classification. This highly successful poem was eventually republished along with a second poem by E. Darwin, The Economy of Vegetation, in 1791 as The Botanic Garden, A Poem in Two Parts, thus launching a movement that was proliferated by such authors as Frances Arabella Rowden, Charlotte Smith, and Robert John Thornton.

Frontispiece for the Digital Exhibition Poetic Botany: Art and Science of the Eighteenth-Century Vegetable World (2016). Credit: Ryan Feigenbaum.

Selenicereus grandiflorus is one of nine species featured in the online exhibition Poetic Botany. Using these plants as a lens through which to highlight the Poetic Botany movement, the exhibition introduces the botanists and works that constituted this period. These botanists were concerned with not just the art of their verse but also with the scientific study of their plant subjects, and thus the Poetic Botany movement reflects a beautiful union of art and science.

Ryan Feigenbaum at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. Credit: Madeline Chera, 2016.

The Poetic Botany exhibition was created by Ryan Feigenbaum as part of a 2015-2016 Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Humanities Institute of the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of The New York Botanical Garden. NYBG, a founding BHL Member who has contributed over 3.9 million pages to the BHL collection, hosts the exhibit.

Feigenbaum, who has a BA in philosophy from DePaul University in Chicago, an MA in philosophy from Villanova University, and is currently completing a PhD in philosophy at Villanova University, researches the history and philosophy of biology. As evidenced through Poetic Botany, this research eventually led him down a botanical path.

“My dissertation, ‘The Epistemic Foundations of German Biology, 1790–1802,’ analyzes the emergence of biology as a science by tracing the genealogy of the organism concept,” explains Feigenbaum. “I came to the history of botany as an offshoot of this project; specifically, I was interested in the eighteenth-century opinion of plants, i.e., their ontological status. Whereas plants had long been regarded as devoid of intelligence, sensitivity, and locomotion, naturalists like Erasmus Darwin began to challenge these views, spurred on by the ‘discovery’ of plants like the Drosera and Mimosa pudica that challenged longstanding prejudices.”

Feigenbaum’s interest in the “life sciences” and the history of botany grew naturally out of his research on philosophy, for these two subjects have historically been intimately connected.

“The separation of philosophy and science is a relatively recent phenomenon,” affirms Feigenbaum. “Descartes, for instance, contributed to mathematics and physics beyond his cogito ergo sum, and much of Aristotle’s corpus focuses not on metaphysics or ethics but natural science. In this vein, I’ve been committed to studying not only eighteenth-century philosophy, but also its life science for the past five years or so. I say ‘life science’ because biology did not yet exist; the word ‘biology,’ in fact, was not used in its modern meaning until 1802. The how and why of biology’s emergence at this time is one focus of my dissertation.”

It was this extension into the ‘life sciences’ that eventually brought Feigenbaum to BHL.

“As my study of the history of philosophy incorporated more and more of the study of the history of science, BHL became a resource I relied on time and again,” asserts Feigenbaum. “At first I would search via Google for a particular eighteenth-century text, but I found it so often on BHL that I ended up using its website portal directly, sparing me the trouble of having to sift through Google results.”

BHL played an important role in the development of Poetic Botany, allowing Feigenbaum to discover and access relevant texts, many of which are linked from the exhibit.

“BHL provides smart access to knowledge that wouldn’t be otherwise available,” lauds Feigenbaum. “My favorite feature is the ability search by species. Since the digital exhibition is organized around species, this ability revealed new sources of which I’d been unaware. It is quite amazing that you can instantly see in which texts a species like Canna indica appeared according to date and then be taken to the exact pages of the reference. Without this resource, my workflow would have been much slower; it would’ve required me to visit multiple archives and search through texts one by one. While such an approach isn’t without its benefits, it inevitably limits what the researcher can do and extends the time required to do it.”

American bog plants: eastern skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus), yellow pitcherplant (Sarracenia flava), and Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula). Thornton, Robert John. New illustration of the sexual system of Carolus von Linnaeus. (1807) http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/307056. Digitized by the Missouri Botanical Garden, Peter H. Raven Library.

While there are many texts featured in Poetic Botany, one of Feigenbaum’s favorites is John Thornton’s New Illustration of the Sexual System. According to Feigenbaum,

“This perennial favorite is often acclaimed for its indisputably beautiful illustrations, perhaps some of the most iconic in existence. However, the accompanying text is also marvelous, giving the reader insights into eighteenth-century botany, snippets of poetry, and whole disquisitions on culture, religion, and other topics.”

This title is also consistently a favorite among BHL’s online audiences. Thanks to the citizen science efforts of Michelle Marshall, this entire work has also been taxon tagged in Flickr, making it easy for you to identify and search for the species contained within it.

We encourage you to take some time to explore Poetic Botany and marvel at the elegant and profound union of art and science represented in the exhibit and texts. Who would have thought that poetry and science could fit together so naturally?

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This post may contain the personal opinions of BHL users or affiliated staff and does not necessarily represent the official Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) position on these matters.

From left: Bruno David, Martin R. Kalfatovic, Laurence Bénichou, Nancy E. Gwinn, Gildas Illien. Photo by Jean-Christophe Domenech

I was honored to participate in the signing ceremony on 2 December 2016 where Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle officially joined the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Accompanying Dr. Nancy E. Gwinn (Smithsonian Libraries Director and Chair of the BHL Members’ Council), the ceremony was held in the amphitheater of the Galeries d’Anatomie comparée et de Paléontologie. Attending on behalf of the MNHN were Dr. Bruno David (Director), Gildas Illien (head of the MNHN library), and Laurence Bénichou (Head, Publications Scientifiques).

Immediately before the meeting, I gave a presentation (“Increasing Access, Promoting Progress: Empowering Global Research through the BHL“) on BHL to representatives from a number of large natural history museums from around the world (including BHL partners American Museum of Natural History, The Field Museum of Natural History, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Natural History Museum (London), National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian Libraries), Natural History Museum Los Angeles County, and Naturalis Biodiversity Center).

Earlier, on 30 November, I was treated to a tour of the MNHN library by M. Illien and had the opportunity to meet with key staff (Alice LeMaire, Anaïs Rameaux, Chloé Besombes, and Vincent Detienne) who will be participating in BHL. The following day, I met with Laurence Bénichou and the staff of the Publications Scientifiques. Topics included BHL metadata models and best practices to be reviewed for ingest of MNHN publications into BHL.

A tour of the Grand Hall of Evolution and the special exhibition, Espèces d’ours! was also arranged. The Grande Galerie de l’Évolution is an amazing four level exhibition that documents life on our planet. The installation is an outstanding re-envisioning of an older space for the 21st century. Of personal interest was the La salle des espèces menacées et disparues and a nice display of artifacts related to Raphus cucullatus.

On 2 December, before the signing ceremony, the Museum arranged for a tour of the Jardin des Plantes for me and Nancy E. Gwinn. Our host, Fabien Dupuis, Desk Officer from the office of International and European Affairs, provided an excellent tour of the gardens and greenhouses that are under the auspices of the Museum.

 

Gwinn (left) and Illien (right)

My special thanks to the staff of the Museum for arranging our visit. Gildas Illien was a superb host who juggled multiple high-profile events during this brief visit. It was a pleasure to meet him in person after many emails and phone calls. All of us at BHL and the Smithsonian look forward to working with him in the years to come. And at last, I was able to meet with Laurence Bénichou in France after seeing her in many other places around the world. Seeing her office, located in the 18th century home of noted naturalist  Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, made one appreciate the over 200 year history of scientific publishing at the Museum.

And yes, good food was had by all …

Raphus cucullatus