On January 4, 2018, in the midst of a memorable storm in the Northeastern US, approximately 30 intrepid travelers met to celebrate the successful completion of the BHL National Digital Stewardship Residencies developed for the IMLS, Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian grant submission: Foundations to Actions: Extending Innovations in Digital Libraries in Partnership with NDSR Learners.  The program plan included hiring five geographically-distributed residents, all graduates of LIS or related master’s programs, to work on collaborative projects to improve tools, curation, and content stewardship for BHL. This work supported BHL development plans for the next generation portal for the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature.

The Capstone event was beautifully hosted by the Smithsonian Libraries at the Natural History Museum in the room where the first DC planning meeting for BHL occurred. Martin Kalfatovic (BHL Program Director and Associate Director, Digital Program and Initiatives for the Smithsonian Libraries) and Dr. Nancy Gwinn (Director of the Smithsonian Libraries) welcomed the group.  Robin Dale (Deputy Director for Library Services at IMLS) described the NDSR program within the context of the IMLS goals for a national digital platform, mentoring digital library leaders and developing communities of practice.  Dr. Scott Miller (Deputy Undersecretary for Collections and Interdisciplinary Support at the Smithsonian Institution) congratulated BHL on its accomplishments in making biodiversity literature accessible but also suggested further work on linking content, mobile access and establishing standards.

Constance Rinaldo (Librarian of the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University and Chair of the BHL Members’ Council) gave an overview of the grant and process emphasizing the importance of ensuring the development of a strong cohort with leadership capacity among the geographically dispersed residents. Leora Siegel (Senior Director, Lenhardt Library of the Chicago Botanic Garden and a BHL NDSR Mentor) reflected on the past year and how rewarding it was to be a mentor to a recent graduate, wrestle with how to push the project forward, and connect with colleagues mentoring related projects with residents across the United States.  Mentors wished for more time, more opportunities to meet face to face with all participants and more professional meeting opportunities.

Katie Mika (BHL NDSR Resident at the Ernst Mayr Library) reflected on being a resident, struggling with the contrary thrusts of independence yet adherence to a partially defined project in a tight time frame.  Residents wished for more time, more structure and an in-depth technical introduction to BHL, yet all were successful in their work and learned more than they expected.

Trevor Owens (Head of Digital Content Management in Library Services at the Library of Congress) wrapped up the event with a keynote that focused on the push towards a National Digital Platform for digital data and his thoughts on digital preservation.

Although the final grant report looms large for the mentors, the Capstone event was an engaging send-off for the residents and we all look forward to following their future accomplishments.

Scott Miller presenting the opening keynote

Katie Mika presenting the BHL NDSR Resident Reflection

Trevor Owens presenting the closing keynote

For specific information about the work of the residents, see their blog
and related BHL blog posts.

BHL NDSR Residents and Mentors

Alicia Esquivel, Resident at Chicago Botanic Garden, focused on Content Analysis.
Leora Siegel, Senior Director, Lenhardt Library

Marissa Kings, Resident at Natural History Museum, Los Angeles County, focused on Digital Library Best Practices.
Richard Hulser, Chief Librarian

Pamela McClanahan, Resident at Smithsonian Libraries, focused on User Needs and Usability.
Carolyn Sheffield, BHL Program Manager

Katie Mika, Resident at Ernst Mayr Library, Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology, focused on Crowdsourced Data Corrections and Enhancements.

Constance Rinaldo, Librarian, Ernst Mayr Library
and Program Director, BHL-NDSR Program
Joseph DeVeer, Project Manager and Museum Liaison, Ernst Mayr Library

Ariadne Rehbein, Resident at Missouri Botanical Garden, focused on Enhancing Image Discovery.
Doug Holland, Library Director, Peter H. Raven Library
Trish Rose-Sandler, Project Manager, Center for Biodiversity Informatics

Thank you to the speakers, external and internal to the grant project, for providing us with encouragement, support and reflections that we can take forward in our day to day work.  I want to especially thank Carolyn Sheffield (BHL Program Manager and Mentor to the Smithsonian Libraries resident) for managing the logistics of the Capstone event and ensuring its excellence.

We are pleased to announce five webinars from BHL’s NDSR residents! Each resident has spent the past 10 months or so working hard on individual—yet inter-related—research projects to explore how we might best improve the features and functionality of BHL to incorporate new technologies and evolving best practices for digital libraries and the larger biodiversity community.

The BHL NDSR Cohort, from left to right: Ariadne Rehbein, Pam McClanahan, Marissa Kings, Katie Mika, and Alicia Esquivel.

Each resident will be delivering a webinar, reporting on the results of their research to date along with their recommendations for BHL. You can find details and links to recordings of all of the webinars below.

Special thanks goes to iDigBio for generously granting the BHL NDSR residents use of their AdobeConnect system! 

BHL NDSR Webinar Schedule: Series One

November 7, 2017 at 2:00pm ET
Alicia Esquivel, Chicago Botanic Garden
Biodiversity Heritage Library: NDSR Collections Analysis
Seminar Room: iDigBio Conference Room ( 500 )
Recording: http://idigbio.adobeconnect.com/pcb8q6y4yy16/

November 9, 2017 at 2:00pm ET
Katie Mika, Ernst Mayr Library, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University
Biodiversity Heritage Library: Transcriptions, Crowdsourcing and Metadata
Seminar Room: iDigBio Conference Room ( 500 )
Recording: http://idigbio.adobeconnect.com/pk7ctpfe00a4/

November 15 at 2:00pm ET
Pam McClanahan, Smithsonian Libraries
Biodiversity Heritage Library: User Studies
Seminar Room: iDigBio Conference Room ( 500 )
Recording: http://idigbio.adobeconnect.com/pd0piuxxvs2z/

BHL NDSR Webinar Schedule: Series Two

November 27, 2017 at 2:00pm ET 
Marissa Kings, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
Biodiversity Heritage Library: Best Practices for Digital Libraries
Seminar Room: iDigBio Conference Room ( 500 )
Recording: http://idigbio.adobeconnect.com/pri8c4khg5sz/

December 5, 2017 at 2:00pm ET
Ariadne Rehbein, Missouri Botanical Garden
Biodiversity Heritage Library: Enabling Image Discovery
Seminar Room: iDigBio Conference Room ( 500 )
Recording: http://idigbio.adobeconnect.com/pf9sm774sjd8/ 

New to Adobe Connect? We recommend following the link to the webinar about 15-20 minutes before the start time to install any add-ins as needed and to run the Audio Wizard. Please note that sometimes after running the Audio Wizard, you may still need to click on the picture of the microphone to connect the microphone. Should you have any questions, we’ll also be monitoring the chat throughout. Hope you can join us!

Zooniverse unveils its latest project called Science Gossip which is an investigation into the making and communication of science in both the Victorian period and today. This project is born from a collaboration between an Arts and Humanities Research Council project in the UK, called ‘Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries’ (ConSciCom) and the Missouri Botanical Garden who provided content from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL).

The publication of books and periodicals are key locations for knowledge about the natural world. The BHL has digitized millions of pages of historic literature on biodiversity from the 1400s to today. Hidden within these pages is a treasure trove of illustrations that you can help identify, classify and correlate. The data you create by tagging illustrations and adding artist and engraver information will have a direct impact on the research of historians who are trying to understand why, how often and who made images depicting a whole range of natural science topics during the Victorian period.

Victorian Periodicals: A Thing of Beauty

Dr. Geoffrey Belknap, historian of Victorian Science, explains the role of natural history publications in the life of a non-professional, or what today we would call “citizen scientists”, and their value for researchers studying them in the 21st century.

Victorian Periodicals as a source base for research are endless fun. They are loaded with odd stories written by characters that you tend not to hear about that often in histories of science. When I was starting my research for the ConSciCom project – which focuses on the use of illustrations within 19th century natural history periodicals – I came across a periodical full of interesting people, images, and even an object!

While perusing the pages of one particularly intriguing periodical, I encountered something I wasn’t expecting. Pressed between the pages of two issues, was a fern – placed there by a yet unknown (and likely never to be known) collector.

For a historian of periodicals, this is treasure indeed! Periodicals are notoriously bad at retaining traces of their readers – or, in this case, users. Unlike books, periodicals were more often than not discarded – unless they were originally purchased by a library. The placement of the fern on a page – incidentally entitled “A Thing of Beauty” – acts as a reminder for me in my research. When I’m reading the articles or looking at the illustrations – which constitute the central focus of my research – I need to keep in mind that these texts are three-dimensional. That they held knowledge, and that readers could add to this by using the pages of periodicals to their own ends.

The periodical containing the fern is called Hardwicke’s Science Gossip: an illustrated medium of interchange and gossip for students and lovers of nature. This may sound familiar, as it is the inspiration for the latest zooniverse project. Science Gossip is a title that is compelling for both 19th and 21st century audiences – and in many ways the content of this Victorian natural history periodical encapsulates exactly what we are attempting to do here. That is, to bring together a whole range of interested non-specialists to engage with science and history through compelling stories and solid facts! Science Gossip (the periodical) was originally written for a broad Victorian audience interested in all things natural history.

When I first came across Science Gossip, sitting on a shelf in the University of Leicester library, it really drew my eye. Boasting an enticing blue cover with a golden embossed name plate, this is a luxurious object. Of course, this would not have been the way that a Victorian would have first encountered this periodical – they were only bound after a year’s run was complete. And often – unless the subscriber was a library – they would never have been saved week by week, let alone bound in garish fashion.

So what first attracted my attention, has little to do with why a Victorian would have spent the two shillings (about £8 today) for their monthly issue of natural history knowledge.

The most enticing aspect of the Science Gossip, for both Victorian and modern readers, is the illustrations dotted across almost every page of the journal. What a reader could see on any given page ranged from Diatoms to imagined 17th-century apes, and everything in between.

The illustrations constituted an essential part of Science Gossip’s appeal, which in turn encouraged a wide range of contributors. Over a 15-year period – beginning in 1865 when the periodical was founded – Science Gossip gave space to over 550 individual authors. Finding out more about the range, social, economic and scientific position of these authors will be a central part of my research over the next three years. But a cursory investigation shows that the authors for Science Gossip are largely unknown. For a project looking at the relationship between the production of images and the production of science by the non-professional, Science Gossip offers a great starting point!

Help Us Uncover Victorian Treasures

Help us unlock these illustrative treasures by adding your own observations to these images. Let us know who created them, their subject matter and any particular species they portray. Having a better understanding of the range of individuals who made science through their images will help us ascertain what constituted a nineteenth century citizen scientist. This is the first Zooniverse project where citizen scientists are both the researchers and subject of the research. Citizen scientists of today can have a direct impact on how we understand historical and modern notions of what it means to do science.

With Contributions From:

Geoffrey Belknap
Post Doc Research Assistant for Constructing Scientific Communities and historian of Victorian Science, Visual Culture and Periodical History 
Victorian Van Hyning
Zooniverse

The first published illustration of the Duck-billed Platypus, from The Naturalist’s Miscellany, or Coloured figures of natural objects, Vol. 10, George Shaw, 1799. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5962/p.304567.

For the past year, BHL-Australia has been very quiet. So quiet, in fact, you would be forgiven for forgetting we exist (unless of course you read about our contribution to the new BHL website).

Why the silence? Because, in 2013, we ran out of funding.

Our digitisation work didn’t stop, however. Deep in the Museum Victoria library, six dedicated volunteers (supervised by equally dedicated library staff) continued to scan and process volumes from our collections and upload them into BHL.

We are now thrilled to announce that BHL-Au is back in full force. Still led by Museum Victoria, we have renewed funding from the Atlas of Living Australia and a new enthusiastic team. And we have grand plans for BHL-Au.

These include:

• The digitisation of non-published works in our historical collection: Gold Registers, Exhibition Catalogues, Field Diaries and the unbound sections of the Prodromus of the Zoology of Victoria.
• The continued digitisation of rare books, starting with those featured in our Art of Science exhibition.
• The establishment and ongoing support of new BHL partners within museums and herbaria around Australia and in New Zealand.
• The strengthening of our existing relationships within the global BHL community.

The books contributed by Museum Victoria can be viewed on our new Collection page on the BHL website.

Coming soon to BHL via BHL-Au: Superb Lyrebird, from An account of the English colony in New South Wales, from its first settlement in January 1788 to August 1801, David Collins, 1804.

Who are BHL-Australia?

The BHL-Au Team: (from left) Hayley Webster, Ely Wallis, Cerise Howard, Jim Healey, Nicole Kearney. Credit: Simon Sherrin, Museum Victoria.

Ely Wallis is the Manager of Online Collections at Museum Victoria, the Chair of BHL-Global and the Project Lead for BHL-Australia. Ely is a zoologist by training but now spends her time publishing the museum’s encyclopedic collections onto websites, gallery interactives and to apps.

Nicole Kearney is the Project Coordinator of BHL-Au. She is a zoologist, science communicator and professional writer/editor. She has worked at Museum Victoria since 2003, most recently on a series of field guide apps. Her position with BHL combines her professional interests with her life-long love of books.

Cerise Howard is the Digitisation Coordinator for BHL-Au. Occupying various roles at Museum Victoria connected to online publishing over the last ten years, she is also the Artistic Director of the Czech and Slovak Film Festival of Australia (CaSFFA), a writer and broadcaster on film, and a musician with a theatrical bent.

Hayley Webster is the Manager of the Museum Victoria Library. She has been involved in BHL-Au since 2011, contributing books for digitisation, providing access to the library collection, arranging for books to be treated by our Conservation department, and working with our dedicated team of volunteers.

Jim Healey has worked for the past two years as a BHL Volunteer and now joins us as the project’s Technical Support Officer. He brings to BHL over 25 years of experience working in IT, as well as a passion for photography and electronics.

The team also includes five passionate and dedicated BHL Volunteers: Bob Griffith, Heidi Griffith, Sue Halliwell, Alan Nankervis and Tiziana Tizian. All five have been with BHL-Au since February 2012.