New Zeutschel OS 16000 scanner purchased by BHL Australia. Book being digitized is: The animal kingdom of the Baron Cuvier, enlarged and adapted to the present state of zoological science. 1839. By Baron Georges Cuvier. Photo Credit: Nicole Kearney.

In 2011, Australia joined the Biodiversity Heritage Library and, led by Museums Victoria, began to digitize the rare books, historic journals and archival material related to Australia’s biodiversity, and to make them openly available online.

There are now 15 Australian organizations contributing to BHL and over 300 worldwide. These include museums, herbaria, royal societies, field naturalists clubs and government organizations.

Just this week the number of volumes digitized for BHL by Australian organizations surpassed 1,000, amounting to over 200,000 pages. The great majority of this digitization work was done by the BHL Australia team at Melbourne Museum. We have a fabulous team of volunteers who scan the pages and prepare the digitized books for upload online.

BHL Australia volunteers with Museums Victoria CEO Lynley Marshall (center) in front of the new BHL Australia scanner. Photo Credit: Nicole Kearney.

In the 6 years we have been doing this work, there have been dramatic advances in digitization technology, both in hardware and in software. We are therefore very excited to announce that BHL Australia has just purchased a new scanner.

Museums Victoria CEO Lynley Marshall scanning the first page for BHL Australia on the new scanner. Photo Credit: Nicole Kearney.

To celebrate the arrival of the new scanner, the Museums Victoria (MV) library hosted an Open House on 24 May, inviting MV staff to learn more about BHL, see a display of rare books from the MV collection, and see the new scanner.

Visitors exploring rare books from the MV collection during the Open House. Book on display is: Thesaurus rerum naturalium. 1734-1765. By Albertus Seba. Photo Credit: Nicole Kearney.

The scanner, a Zeutschel OS 16000, will increase both the quality and quantity of our scanning work, and will automate much of our post processing. This will allow us to further expand our project and to make even more of Australia’s biodiversity heritage literature available online, so stay tuned for the next 200,000 pages!

Peruse the BHL Australia collection.

BHL Australia is funded by the Atlas of Living Australia.

Belted Kingfisher. Warren, Benjamin Harry. Some Birds and Mammals which Destroy Fish and Game. Clarence M. Busch, state printer of Pennsylvania, 1897. Digitized by The Library of Congress. http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/29736925. Illustration reproduced from Audubon’s Birds of America.

In the wake of the Quakers’ immigration to North America, a taste for the study of nature came “quietly” into being among descendants from the “tolerant” zones, notably the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

In the biographical notes from a 1919 introduction to the ornithology of Chester County, Pennsylvania, the active local ornithologists were concentrated in neighborhoods “settled largely by the English, Welsh, Scotch-Irish and German members of the Society of Friends, commonly called ‘Quakers’.” Publications in that period say the study of the natural sciences seemed “peculiarly agreeable.” Among these naturalists is Dr. Benjamin Harry Warren, the author of our featured book – Some Birds and Mammals which Destroy Fish and Game.

A West Chester native born in 1858, Warren was a productive ornithologists whose work was widely cited by ornithology monographs and papers during that period. During his youth, Warren had experienced an already bourgeoning field of Ornithology in Chester County. Since the late eighteenth century, some incipient ornithologists of the area had started searching for materials and accumulating specimens, with the help of taxidermists.

West Chester became home to the Chester County Cabinet of Science as early as the 1820s, and only about a decade later, the ornithological department acquired “the first nearly complete collection of local birds in the county”. There was, however, no catalogue of this collection; and the first county bird list was published much later in the 1860s. “If the second quarter of the nineteenth century failed of being the golden period of ornithology in Chester County,” the author of Chester Ornithology wittily remarked in the biographical notes, “it was due to Quaker modesty”.

Portrait of Benjamin Harry Warren. The Ornithology of Chester County, Pennsylvania. RG Badger, 1919. Digitized by Cornell University Library. http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/37769995.

Before commissioned by the Department of Agriculture to investigate “the damage done by the fish-destroying birds and mammals”, Warren was already a professional “birder.” He published a list of 218 bird species in 1879-1880, and worked continuously to update the repository. Though his contemporary Witmer Stone – who served as president of the American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU), editor of the AOU’s periodical The Auk, and was also a botanist– may be a better-known ornithologist, Warren’s Report on the Birds of Pennsylvania was considered one of the first major works on Pennsylvania ornithology.

During Warren’s time, “birders” actively collected bird specimens – rather different from the aesthetics of the “non-collecting” birding preferred by modern ornithologists after the turn of the century. For his Report on the Birds of Pennsylvania, Warren, a medical doctor, dissected and examined over four thousand bird stomachs. In Some Birds and Mammals which Destroy Fish and Game, as the main research was to dissect the animal’s diet and evaluate if the species is piscivorous (fish-eating), post-mortem viscera examination was again the main approach.

To evaluate the extent to which birds and mammals damage the local fish populations, Warren spent three years collecting data from reliable sources. For this project, the Department of Agriculture reached out to the public by distributing circular notes asking for personal experiences related to the fish-damaging behavior of wild animals. Thus, Warren included in the report a number of correspondences with local farmers, fishermen and naturalists, in addition to his own study.

The Mink. Warren, Benjamin Harry. Some Birds and Mammals which Destroy Fish and Game. Clarence M. Busch, state printer of Pennsylvania, 1897. Digitized by The Library of Congress. http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/29736933.

Warren concluded, from diet analyses and population survey, that birds and mammals overall played an insignificant role in fish decline. The real threat to local fish loss was illegal fishing. A long-standing misunderstanding, as it turned out, could only be effectively corrected by scientific evidence.

Fish Hawk. Warren, Benjamin Harry. Some Birds and Mammals which Destroy Fish and Game. Clarence M. Busch, state printer of Pennsylvania, 1897. Digitized by The Library of Congress. http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/29736918.

The initiative of this research appears anthropocentric, but through careful investigation, valuable information on morphology, diet and behavior of the local wildlife was gathered. Warren not only presented in detail the characters of each species with carefully drawn colored-illustrations (which were reproduced from other sources, including Audubon’s Birds of America), but also weaved vivid “behavioral dramas” into his artful account of species interactions. The excerpt below shows a gripping story exemplifying antagonism between two raptors:

“…Perched on some tall summit, in view of the ocean, or of some water-course, he (the Bald Eagle) watches every motion of the Fish Hawk while on wing. When the latter rises from the water, with a fish in its grasp, forth rushes the eagle in pursuit. He mounts above the Fish Hawk, and threatens it by actions well understood, when the latter, fearing perhaps that its life is in danger, drops its prey. In an instant the eagle, accurately estimating the rapid descent of the fish, closes his wings, follows it with the swiftness of thought, and the next moment grasps it.”

Bald Eagle. Warren, Benjamin Harry. Some Birds and Mammals which Destroy Fish and Game. Clarence M. Busch, state printer of Pennsylvania, 1897. Digitized by The Library of Congress. http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/29736916.

In addition, readers could find bits of cultural elements sprinkled through the book – charming bird-lores and superstitions, such as the Tartars’ belief that touching a woman with a kingfisher’s feather would make her fall in love with them.

These cultural myths, beautiful yet unrealistic, remind us of the hidden theme of the book: the relationship between man and nature. Works like Warren’s Some Birds and Mammals which Destroy Fish and Game demonstrate the ardent and indefatigable efforts of early naturalists to capture these relationships and expand our knowledge of the natural world.

References

• Warren, Benjamin Harry. Some Birds and Mammals which Destroy Fish and Game. Clarence M. Busch, state printer of Pennsylvania, 1897.
• Warren, Benjamin Harry. Report on the Birds of Pennsylvania: With Special Reference to the Food Habits, Based on Over Four Thousand Stomach Examinations. EK Meyers, State Printer, 1890.
• Burns, Franklin Lorenzo. The Ornithology of Chester County, Pennsylvania. RG Badger, 1919.

Self Portrait, Susan Fereday. National Library of Australia. Source: WikiCommons.

I love volunteering for the Biodiversity Heritage Library. I taxo tag images in the BHL Flickr account. This assists the use of these images by BHL as well as other institutions that use BHL content. It is also my favorite way of exploring BHL. I get a real thrill out of the serendipitous discoveries I make while tagging.

My most recent BHL adventure resulted from tagging an album of images from the boringly named but absolutely fabulous Botany of the Antarctic voyage of H. M. discovery ships Erebus and Terror in the years 1839-1843. Amongst the many images in this album was one of a particular species of seaweed – Nemastoma feredayae.

Nemastoma feredayae. Art by William Henry Harvey. The botany of the Antarctic voyage of H.M. discovery ships Erebus and Terror in the Years 1839-1843. http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/28467702. Digitized by the Missouri Botanical Garden.

I tagged the image with the species name given, and then I attempted to confirm the current name of the seaweed. In doing so, I stumbled across the fact that the seaweed was named in honor of Mrs. Susan Fereday. Who was this mystery woman?

Unable to resist going down that rabbit hole, I googled her. I discovered that Susan Fereday emigrated to Tasmania, Australia from England in 1846. She was a talented artist. So talented, her artwork is now in the collection of the National Library of Australia. She concentrated on painting beautiful images of fauna and flora in and around the area where she lived.

Hibbertia sericea by Susan Fereday. National Library of Australia. Source: WikiCommons.

She was also a keen collector of seaweed specimens. She corresponded with and sent specimens to one of the foremost experts in algae of the day, William Henry Harvey. Harvey in turn honored Fereday’s contribution to the study of algae by naming two species after her. It was the image of one of those species drawn by Harvey that I had tagged in the BHL Flickr feed.

Portrait of William Henry Harvey. Oliver, F. W. (Francis Wall). Makers of British botany. (1913). http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/1073575. Digitized by MBLWHOI Library.

While researching Fereday, I was disappointed to see she did not have Wikipedia page. Being a keen Wikipedian, I decided to rectify this. While drafting her article, I realized that several sources had different dates as her birth date. I emailed the National Library of Australia via their “Ask a Librarian” service to ask them to help me confirm that their records were correct.

I received a fabulously researched reply from Damien Cole, one of their librarians. He discovered that the birth date confusion was due to Susan Fereday having a sister of the same name, who had died prior to our Susan being born. Fereday was actually born in 1815! As a result of this research, the National Library subsequently edited their records to give Susan Fereday her birth date, and I obtained a reputable citation supporting that information for Fereday’s Wikipedia article.

The National Library of Australia has also shared the changes they made to their database with the Australian National Herbarium as well as Design and Art Australia Online. The Library even went so far as to contact the Encyclopedia of Australian Science to inform them of the Wikipedia article in the hope that that organization might also consider including Fereday in their website.

All of this resulted because the MBLWHOI Library (the Marine Biological Laboratory and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Library) scanned the volumes on the Antarctic voyage of H. M. discovery ships Erebus and Terror and made them available to BHL. Because BHL added the images from those volumes to Flickr, I was able to tag them.

It just goes to show that when you mix citizen science with digitization and the ability to freely reuse content, everyone benefits.

I would love it if people joined me in taxotagging BHL Flickr images. Instructions can be found here.

Anyone can create or improve Wikipedia. For a beginner’s guide, see this article.

And if you think you can add to and improve Susan Fereday’s article, go for it!

April was a busy month for all of us residents! We attended and presented at two conferences in two different cities: first, at the 4th annual DPLAFest in Chicago and then the NDSR Symposium in Washington D.C. the following week. Our presentations at these two conferences challenged us to think in new ways and demonstrated the support that the cohort and mentor model is designed to provide. In between preparing for and presenting at conferences, we have also been progressing on our projects and at our host institutions.

L to R Ariadne, Pam, Marissa, Katie and Alicia

The NDSR Symposium was a great complement to DPLAFest, which was more of a large-scale snapshot of projects and practices in managing digital libraries. The Symposium, by contrast, felt very meta – this was past, present, and future residents, mentors, and hosts as well as IMLS staff and other individuals involved in creating and supporting the NDSR program looking inwards on what has been done and what we want the program to become in the near future. Despite the inward-focus, wider themes and issues were obviously discussed, especially by the keynote speakers, who stressed the importance of human-information interaction, community-building, and participatory leadership. We left the Symposium feeling empowered to advocate for not only the NDSR Program but also the IMLS and data preservation communities as a whole. Check out our DPLAfest and NDSR Symposium reflection blog post to learn more about our experiences and our presentations.

Ariadne’s project focuses on access to illustrations in BHL’s corpus of biodiversity literature. In her latest update, she shares lessons from conversations with Research Department staff at the Missouri Botanical Garden and with BHL stakeholders and a fundamental look into BHL’s current illustration crowdsourcing efforts on Flickr and Science Gossip. Crowdsourcing, user experience, and data curation will all play important roles in her next steps: speaking with BHL’s crowdsourcing volunteers, preparing the metadata for improved access, and hopefully, anticipating future possibilities for metadata creation.

Katie is also investigating crowdsourcing methods to transcribe manuscript items in BHL. Translating images of handwritten content into machine readable data that can be searched, sorted, and otherwise manipulated had not received much attention until crowdsourcing, citizen science, and other types of community collaboration models and platforms were constructed. Defining transcription activities is useful for understanding some of the competing elements when considering whether and how to transcribe digitized items.

Transcription helps bridge the gap between digitization and use by enhancing access through full text search, enriching metadata collection, and opening collections to digital textual analysis. Digitized natural history manuscript items are largely hidden due to the lack of item level description for most archival collections. While minimal processing is certainly the better option compared to maintaining an extensive backlog of unprocessed material, digitized handwritten documents are not discoverable based on their unique content without a machine readable facsimile. Indexing transcriptions facilitates discovery of historical records and improves catalog search results. By offering full text transcriptions, the digital collections are opened up to new types of searching, sorting, categorizing, and pattern finding. Research derived from these new data sets can illustrate changes over time across much larger magnitudes of collections and types of information resources.

Alicia got the chance to learn more about the management at a botanic garden by visiting the Living Plant Documentation department at the Chicago Botanic Garden. The CBG maintains records much like museums do, however, the collection items at CBG happen to be living (and thus can die, move, create new items, etc.). Each plant that enters the collection is given an accession number and deemed to be a member of the permanent collection or given “seasonal” status as a part of a temporary collection (like the orchids that were on view in the orchid show that closed at the end of March). This data is all managed through an internal database and used to populate the garden’s app, GardenGuide, and the web applications, What’s in Bloom and Plant Finder.

Marissa has been working on getting article metadata added to the journal Contributions in Science, a publication of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. The entire run of the journal from 1957 to present has been digitized and added to BHL, but without metadata describing each individual article, the journal isn’t searchable. The process of making it searchable has involved using Python code, EndNote, and getting lots of help from BHL staff and volunteers, so stay tuned for an upcoming blog post about this work in progress!

Pam has been getting to know the BHL users and will be sharing a post on the NDSR at BHL blog soon about the different types of users working with BHL. There are three distinct groups of users – those affiliated with the BHL consortium, those who use BHL at the system level, and then individual researchers. Pam is developing surveys and will possibly use other methods as well to solicit feedback from each of these user groups. She will also be taking a close look at all user submitted feedback through the BHL website as well as Google Analytics for the BHL website. Be on the lookout for an upcoming blog post about this work!