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. Likewise,  EOL species pages contain links to all identified literature in BHL referencing those species. Through the use of machine tagging, BHL also supplies species illustrations to EOL. To date, 16,496,376 pages in BHL link to EOL species pages, and 1,177,510 EOL pages link to BHL literature. BHL has contributed 13,808 images to EOL.

On 28-29 July, 2014, the EOL Executive Committee Meeting was held at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Agenda topics included strategic planning, EOL content growth and integration with external databases, repackaging content for educational purposes, and the success of Traitbank (a searchable, comprehensive, open digital repository for organism traits, measurements, interactions and other facts for all taxa across the tree of life).

Dr. Nancy Gwinn, Director of Smithsonian Libraries and the BHL Executive Committee Chair, was asked to give a BHL update at the meeting. Her presentation highlighted BHL content and membership growth, the Art of Life project, and notable activities over the past six months, including the Field Book Project, participation in the Bouchout Declaration, the joint SIL/BHL exhibit “Once There Were Billions,” Purposeful Gaming, Mining Biodiversity, and the Global Names Project.

Dr. Gwinn also showcased notable BHL/EOL collaborative activities and achievements over the past six months. The May 28th Smithsonian Associates event on Digital Volunteerism, which provided volunteers an opportunity to tag BHL illustrations with species names and explore the iNaturalist platform, was of particular interest.

“Planning for EOL’s future is proceeding with vigor and enthusiasm,” said Dr. Gwinn following the meeting. “I am pleased that BHL continues to contribute to this process.”

Making biodiversity knowledge freely available to everyone is an ambitious goal. But by continuing to share content and collaborate with EOL and like-minded initiatives through joint events, knowledge transfer, and cooperative needs analysis and service development, we are confident we will achieve it.

View Nancy’s Presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/costantinog/bhl-update-at-the-encyclopedia-of-life-executive-committee-meeting-2014

Pictured left to right:  Rob Guralnick, Mike Lichtenberg, Kyle Jaebker, Trish Rose-Sandler, Guarav Vaidya, Joel Richard, Doug Holland, William Ulate.  Not pictured:  Chris Freeland, Mike Blomberg, Chuck Miller.

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%).  Currently, an environment is being established to enable efficient processing of those two algorithms across the entire corpus of 40+ million pages.  There was also discussion on how to refine the functionality of the Macaw tool which will be used to broadly classify the page images into groups such as illustrations, photographs, diagrams/tables, and maps.  Further work on the schema included efforts to create an application profile based on VRA Core and Darwin Core element sets.   Finally, the team wrapped up the meeting by investigating bulk uploads of large numbers of images to Flickr and Wikimedia Commons as well as how to then extract the resulting crowdsourced metadata back into the BHL portal.

Notes and action items from the meeting can be found on the Art of Life site  http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Art+of+Life.

Pictured left to right:  Kyle Jaebker, Joel Richard, Mike Lichtenberg, Mike Blomberg, William Ulate, Doug Holland, Guarav Vaidya, Chris Freeland. Not pictured:  Chuck Miller, Rob Guralnick

Questions about the project’s goals, progress, and technology can be directed to Principal Investigator, Trish Rose-Sandler at trish.rose-sandler [at] mobot.org.  The Art of Life project runs from May 1, 2012 through April 30, 2014 and is generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this blog post do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Arno River in Florence, Italy

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.

Definitely a big pool of topics for choosing what to attend, from sustainability issues on International e-Collaborations to several talks on tools, methods and experiences with Data Quality. Some sessions presented proposals to document Darwin Core, another wanted to cover the minimum information standard for biological collections beyond the Darwin Core while still another stated further requirements for the Darwin Archives star schema .  There were expositions of interesting experiences in crowdsourcing websites and coordinating their communities and even a symposium and small hackathon to crowdsource the construction of a common vocabulary for biodiversity.  The list goes on and on and makes for an excellent up-to-date resource to read about the latest and greatest in biodiversity informatics!

BHL hosted its own Symposium: “Crafting the future of a Global Biodiversity Library for diverse community’s needs: the case of scientists.” The panel discussed how the needs of the scientific community have guided BHL’s approach, not only this past year, but also how we’re looking to address those needs in the future.  Make sure to read the insightful presentations linked from the previous post by our BHL Program Director, Martin Kalfatovic.

BHL’s Trish Rose-Sandler admiring the frescoes on the walls of the first courtyard of Palazzo Vecchio, designed in 1453 by Michelozzo

Nevertheless, for me, the most prominent and distinctive characteristic of this TDWG Meeting, besides the delightful scenery outside, was probably the Meta-Workshop of current advances and concrete proposals in the Semantics for Biodiversity.  The many colleagues involved put together a very informative set of talks, even considering those newbies to the topic, opening with an introductory video and a Primer Session, followed up by presentations on Technologies, Formal Models and Interoperability with Semantics from the Genomic and Environmental fields. It will be really exciting to see how much all these projects will have advanced by our meeting next year in Kenya!  One in particular that I would like to note is the advancement of EOL’s Traitbank, which is opening doors to many possibilities for determining what we might be looking at in TDWG, EOL & BHL during the next years!

If you missed any of the presentations or want a complete panorama of the Semantics for Biodiversity, just take your time to go through the presentations available at the TDWG site.

And last, but not least, we were very pleased, as always, to share at TDWG with our scientific and technical colleagues who support BHL in so many ways.  We met several of those friends from institutions and projects BHL has collaborated with this year, such as: BioStor, Zoobank, Kew Gardens, IPNI, Index Fungorum, Plazi,  Karlsruhe Institute of Technology,  Pensoft, Vibrant, EOL, GBIF France, Canadensys and many others that I should include here and whose technical contributions keep making BHL what it is.

To all of you: Ci vediamo l’anno prossimo in Kenya!

Presentation link:  http://t.co/hQD2UnGMRX

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.

Correspondence: Adair (John) and Engelmann (George), 1874 http://biodiversitylibrary.org/item/132585#page/1/mode/1up

The Art of Life is a project to identify and describe the rich natural history illustrations hidden within the pages of BHL literature.  The George Engelmann Correspondence project is a project to digitize and make available in BHL letters sent to 19th century botanist, George Engelmann by his colleagues in the United States and Europe.  Both projects are providing new content types to the BHL portal.  They help to contextualize BHL’s published literature and expand its audiences.

Attendees at Digital HPS included researchers, technologists, and librarians who work on digital projects and build scholarly tools to help study, datamine, visualize, and improve access to content in the history and philosophy of science.  While many in the audience were aware of the BHL, they did not know about the expansion of content types beyond the published literature.  This was a great opportunity to expose BHL content to new audiences and build relationships across the humanities and science communities.

The Art of Life project is funded through a 2012 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Digitization of Engelmann’s correspondence is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by the Missouri State Library, a division of the Office of the Secretary of State.

Museums and the Web poster. Trish Rose-Sandler.

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.

Attendees at the VRA conference are image curators, librarians, and archivists who support scholars in arts and humanities departments within universities or museums. Rose-Sandler’s talk at VRA was part of a session on how visual resource collections are reaching out to new audiences through promotion of their content and collaboration with other disciplines. Much in the same way, BHL is reaching out to new audiences through its image content which has a broad appeal among many different fields of research.

MW Demo Table.

The MW conference is attended by folks who work on the technology side of cultural heritage organizations, mostly museums, but also some libraries and historical societies. The story of BHL and its images was told through a one hour demo session that included a poster, one page handouts, and a slideshow of the illustrations. Rose-Sandler and her Art of Life colleague, Kyle Jaebker, explained the challenges BHL faces in identifying the location of millions of images, how we are providing limited access via Flickr, as well as how the Art of Life project is helping scale this effort by automating their identification and crowdsourcing their description. These visually-oriented professionals were enamored of the image content we possess. One visitor at MW, a scientific illustrator from Prague, commented that her students had used images from the BHL Flickr stream for a scientific illustration course she taught. Other visitors were interested in the algorithms we were developing for automatically identifying the location of images within text resources.

Most of the attendees at both conferences were completely unaware of BHL. Those who had heard of BHL were surprised to learn we provided access to natural history illustrations. VRA and MW provide unique opportunities for us to showcase the BHL content to communities who might not have heard of us otherwise. Natural history illustrations provide common ground where the art and scientific communities intersect. If you have any suggestions for other conferences or venues we should be present at, please send us feedback or email us at [email protected].

View Handouts from the Museums and the Web Conference:

• The Art of Life Project
• Uploading Images to Flickr
• Tagging Images in Flickr
• The Art of Life Algorithm