All posts tagged with art-of-life

The BHL and Encylopedia of Life (EOL) share the vision of open access to knowledge about life on earth. BHL works to achieve this goal by providing open access to biodiversity literature. EOL tackles this challenge by gathering, generating, and sharing biodiversity knowledge in an open, freely accessible digital repository. BHL and EOL have been collaborating since 2007, sharing content, best practices, and expertise. Both websites are also extensively interlinked. Taxa identified on pages in BHL are linked to the corresponding species page in EOL.

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%).

I also had the luck to attend the TDWG Annual Conference in Florence, Italy this past October/November 2013. This year’s topic was “Virtual Communities for Biodiversity Science”, a very relevant topic for BHL and one notable difference of this year’s meeting, compared to the last three years I have attended, was the numerous Symposia and Workshops organized by several communities within biodiversity informatics.

Two BHL-related projects were recently presented during the Digital History and Philosophy of Science (Digital HPS) meeting held at Indiana University, Bloomington, September 6-7. Trish Rose-Sandler, from the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Center for Biodiversity Informatics, spoke about the Art of Life project.  Daron Dierkes, from the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Peter H. Raven Library, spoke about the George Engelmann Correspondence Project. The Art of Life is a project to identify and describe the rich natural history illustrations hidden within the pages of BHL literature.

This spring BHL staff member Trish Rose-Sandler participated in two conferences which were outside of the biodiversity community but whose attendees were very much interested in the natural history illustrations found within the pages of BHL books and journals. These included the Visual Resources Association (VRA) annual conference held in Providence, Rhode Island, April 3-5, and the Museums and the Web (MW) conference held in Portland, Oregon, April 17-20.

Nǐ hǎo! Last month, I attended the Annual Meeting of the Biodiversity Informatics Standards Organization (www.tdwg.org), one of my favorite meetings of the year because it provides a thorough view of the current advances in the field of Biodiversity Informatics. TDWG 2012 was hosted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China, on Oct. 22-27.