All posts in BHL News

On January 15, 2014, ten international research funders from four countries jointly announced the winners of the third Digging into Data Challenge, a competition to develop new insights, tools and skills in innovative humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis. Fourteen international teams representing Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States will receive grants totaling approximately $5.1 million to investigate how computational techniques can be applied to “Big Data”.

In the US, we set aside time to reflect and give thanks in November as part of the Thanksgiving holiday.  It is now the start of a new year–and only the first month, not the eleventh–yet BHL already has a lot for which to give thanks! Since the start of the fiscal year 2014 (October 1), donors from across the world have contributed $2,434.12 to support BHL’s continuing mission.

Two members of BHL’s Technical Advisory Group (TAG), BHL Technical Director William Ulate from Missouri Botanical Garden and Joe deVeer, Head of Technical Services of the Ernst Mayr Library at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard, “virtually” attended the CITSCribe Hackathon in Gainesville, Florida from Dec. 16 to 20, 2013.

I was the Virtual Marketing Intern at Smithsonian’s Biodiversity Heritage Library in fall 2013. I participated in this internship post graduation because while I have previous experience with social media and marketing from my previous career, this internship provided me experience directly promoting a library collection. Also, while my background and passion is in the arts, I always had and will have a special place in my heart for science, especially biology. For the position, I wrote seven blog posts that highlighted books from the BHL library.

Dr. Geoffrey Mwachala, Director, Research and Collection at the National Museum of Kenya, stopped to visit Martin Kalfatovic and Nancy Gwinn while in Washington on other biodiversity and museum collections business at the Smithsonian. While at Smithsonian Libraries, he was able to visit the scanning facility in the National Museum of Natural History and see some of the BHL digitization operations in action. Dr. Mwachala is a strong supporter of BHL Africa and the expansion of biodiversity knowledge.

The NEH-funded Art of Life project recently held its second face to face meeting November 2013 in St. Louis, Missouri.  Institutions represented were from the Missouri Botanical Garden (MOBOT), Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), the University of Colorado Boulder (CU-Boulder); Washington University, St Louis (WUSTL), and Smithsonian Institution Libraries (SIL). The team focused primarily on how to bring the algorithm work to a close.  The IMA developed four algorithms for identifying which pages in the BHL corpus contain images.  Those algorithms were run across a gold standard set of 40k pages to determine their accuracy and performance.  Two of the four algorithms were deemed to be useful (accuracy ratings were above 80%).