BHL has over 49 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 100,000 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 100,000 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 Users run into a variety of challenges when tagging images, including outdated species names (users are encouraged to tag images with more modern names), plates without species names, and names in foreign languages or in fonts that are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.

See our updated Flickr Tagging Tutorial here.

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/

Today, we feature another of our own: Museum Librarian Christine Giannoni at the Field Museum in Chicago, IL. Christine is an active member of the BHL consortium, managing the workflow to scan Field books for BHL, as well as participating in a variety of BHL groups and committees, including the BHL Institutional Council. She is an avid fan and proponent of the BHL project, tirelessly promoting it among her researchers and patrons. We are very thankful for her valuable contributions to the project.

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

I am the Museum Librarian at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. I am responsible for the overall operation of the Library, focused upon ensuring access to collections, providing excellent service to our patrons & promotion of the variety of resources in our collections.

How long have you been working in a library environment?

I have worked in several different types of libraries for the last 17 years. While completing my undergraduate degree in Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I got a job shelving books in a local public library, and I was hooked. I was also able to volunteer at The Field Museum during my undergrad years, so that helped a lot when it came to the first big challenge of working at The Field Museum – finding your way around the building!

When did you first discover BHL?

I discovered BHL around 2007 when The Field Museum Library first started digitizing FMNH publications in partnership with the scanning center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. At the time I was Reference & Circulation Librarian, with supervisory responsibility for Interlibrary Loan. Having digital access to the Fieldiana series as well as the Museum’s early News and Annual Report series was (and remains) a fantastic resource.

What is your current level of involvement in BHL?

I devote several hours per week to various BHL activities. Our participation in regards to scanning is primarily related to user requests for filling in “missing” issues within the BHL corpus. We were also fortunate in late 2011 to receive funding for scanning from the Museum’s Africa Council. With these funds, we were able to scan literature related to African Biodiversity, several volumes of which came from our rare collection. Furthermore, I am actively working on training volunteers and interns to paginate BHL scanned materials – a very satisfying activity for them as they can immediately see the results of their work on BHL.

What is your opinion of BHL and what impact has it had on your duties as a librarian?

I feel that working on the BHL project is one of most rewarding aspects of my job. For many years, I have interacted with researchers from all over the world who come to use The Field’s specimen and object collections. When they inevitably come to the Library during their visit, I often hear things such as, “these books are nowhere in my country” or “I have needed to see this item for my research for years.” The fact that we can now make these materials freely available to researchers worldwide is incredibly satisfying.

How often do you use BHL?

Everyday. I remain a primary reference and interlibrary loan contact for internal and external users. I rarely have a day where I do not direct users to the BHL to fulfill a request.

What has been the reaction of your patrons to BHL?

Reaction to the BHL is overwhelmingly positive. As people grow more accustomed to the convenience of electronic publications, they are extremely grateful for its existence. I recall earlier in my career when individuals felt that you could digitize materials and put it into deep storage. In my experience, users view BHL content and then sometimes contact me in order to see “the real thing.” This isn’t necessarily because they distrust the content, but are interested in some other aspect of the work (the item as a physical artifact, for instance). I also have users concerned about conservation/condition of print, so they like the alternative.

What services/features do you like the most about BHL and which do you most like to point out to your patrons? Which services/features are your patrons most excited about/use most often?

For me, I like that the URL’s are easy to copy and send along…From the researcher perspective, they like being able to generate PDFs.

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?

Full-text searching is mentioned all the time.

Is there a specific item on BHL that is most often requested by your patrons/that you use more than any other to fulfill ILL requests?

Our FM publications for sure!

John James Audubon, by John Syme, 1826

Today in 1785, John James Audubon was born. A famous French-American ornithologist, naturalist, and painter, Audubon is responsible for one of the most celebrated ornithological books ever published, Birds of America. Baron Cuvier praised this work as “the most splendid monuments which art has erected in honor of ornithology.”

Audubon was born Jean Rabin, the illegitimate son of French naval officer Lieutenant Jean Audubon, in Les Cayes, Saint-Domingue on his father’s sugar plantation. In 1803, after living in France with his father for his youth, Audubon immigrated to the United States, changing his name to John James Audubon. During his early years in America, though pursuing several business ventures with his father and other partners, Audubon continuously honed his natural history skills, painstakingly studying nature and drawing his observations, with a particular affinity for birds. Though his business success was tumultuous (he even landed in debtor’s prison in 1819 and earned barely enough money to support his family through his sketches), in 1820 Audubon finally started an expedition up the Mississippi in an endeavor to paint all the birds of North America for eventual publication. This ambition later became Birds of America.

Birds of America represents more than 14 years of field observations and drawings by Audubon. In 1826, unable to gain support for publication in America, Audubon traveled to England, where his work was a great success, and he was able to raise enough funds to begin publication. Birds of America contains 435 hand-colored, life-sized prints of 497 bird species and presents a total of more than 700 North American bird species. The cost of printing the entire work was $115,640, the equivalent of more than $2,000,000 today. Published in sections from 1827-38, it includes illustrations of 6 now-extinct birds species, including the Passenger Pigeon and Great Auk. 119 copies of the work are known to survive, and The Economist estimates that 5 of the 10 highest prices ever paid for printed works were paid for copies of this title. The most recent sale of a complete set occurred in 2010 for approximately $11.5 million.

Several titles by Audubon or based on his journals can be found in BHL. One of our favorites, and our book of the week, is The Life of John James Audubon, the Naturalist, a biography of his life, edited by his widow, Lucy Bakewell Audubon. Audubon’s memoir, the title consists largely of abstracts from his journals. Today, a century and a half after this great man’s death, we salute his accomplishments and the contributions he made to natural history. We hope you’ll enjoy learning about him in our book of the week as much as we have. 

You can see digital versions of the 435 elephant folios and the accompanying text in Birds of America from the University of Pittsburgh. Explore the 1840-44 edition of the work, digitized by Smithsonian Libraries, in BHL.