2023 proved to be a transformative year of growth, increased collaboration, and heightened dedication to advancing biodiversity knowledge for the BHL Cataloging and Metadata Committee. Last year, the Committee achieved significant milestones in committee governance, professional development opportunities, data quality updates, and the ratification of consortia-wide data policies, accompanied by comprehensive documentation.

On the governance front, the former “Cataloging working group” completed a Committee Charter to elevate the group’s status to an official BHL Committee. Approval of the Committee at the 2023 BHL Annual Meeting by the Executive Committee and BHL Partners, as well as the formal codification in the BHL Bylaws, solidifies Cataloging and Metadata as a permanent standing BHL Committee.

In 2023, the Committee held its inaugural Chair Election which signified a notable transition for the former working group. We are excited to welcome Daniel Euphrat of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives and Elizabeth McKinley of the Chicago Field Museum as the co-chairs for 2024. Additionally, we extend our gratitude and appreciation to former chairs Suzanne Pilsk of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives and Diana Duncan of the Chicago Field Museum, who will continue to provide valuable mentorship during this transitional period. A warm welcome and congratulations to Daniel Euphrat and Elizabeth McKinley on becoming the inaugural co-chairs in 2024.

The Committee membership grew with the addition of advisors, retired staff as observers, and new members:

• Siobhan Leachman, Committee Advisor and Independent Wikimedian
• Elizabeth McKinley, Committee Co-Chair and Cataloging & Metadata Librarian at the Chicago Field Museum
• Briana Giasullo, Committee Member and Cataloging and Digital Resources Librarian at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University
• Sandra Lee Parker Provenzano, Committee Member and Head Cataloger at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University

As a newly formalized Committee, this coming year will see some fresh perspectives and ideas to drive progress on BHL Strategic Goals and the Committee’s formal charge.

Empowering BHL Staff with Wiki Education’s Wikidata Certificate Course

A tangible benefit of Committee membership includes access to broader professional development opportunities through BHL. Early in 2023, committee members celebrated the completion and final project wrap-up of a six-week professional certificate course sponsored by BHL and the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives (SLA). This specialized course was facilitated by Wiki Education, a non-profit that focuses exclusively on supporting students, faculty, and subject area specialists with their Wikimedia work. The program provided BHL and SLA staff with a unique opportunity to hone advanced skills in SPARQL queries, visualizations, and data modeling.

Left to right: SPARQL visualizations of BHL Authors by Occupation; BHL Female Authors by Occupation; BHL Male Authors by Occupation. The course provided participants with the opportunity to experiment with linked data and visualizations produced by the Wikidata Query Service.

The custom curriculum, led by the knowledgeable Will Kent aka “Wikidata Will” and SLA co-facilitators JJ Dearborn, Richard Naples, Suzanne Pilsk, and Jackie Shieh engaged a cohort of 25 participants in a tailored, immersive experience exploring topics like SPARQL queries, visualizations, federation, data modeling, bulk data loading, and editing tools.

Participants added BHL partner nodes as items and linked them up with BHL using the Wikidata in partnership property:

The BEFORE is what BHL’s Partner Knowledge Graph looked like and AFTER the course, one can see how BHL’s network has grown in Wikidata!

Enriching our Committee’s technical expertise has not only opened new avenues for exploration within the Wikimedia project ecosystem but has also laid the foundation for the newly formed BHL-WIKI working group, set to launch this year under the distinguished leadership of Wikimedia Laureate and long-time BHL advocate, Siobhan Leachman. Under Siobhan’s guidance, BHL is embarking on a dedicated effort to convert its legacy data into 5-star linked open data, facilitating expanded global access to biodiversity knowledge for all.

For a more in-depth understanding of BHL’s symbiotic relationship with the Wikimedia ecosystem, we encourage readers to explore related post “BHL is Round Tripping Persistent Identifiers with the Wikidata Query Service,” and the white paper titled “Unifying Biodiversity Knowledge to Support Life on a Sustainable Planet.”

Comprehensive BHL Metadata Requirements for our Global Consortium

Conformant metadata in BHL is the linchpin that allows BHL to manage diverse global sources of metadata across 588+ contributors. A guiding document is paramount to fostering metadata harmonization from a globally disparate network and empowers BHL technical staff in maintaining data consistency and ensuring interoperability across the consortium. The new BHL metadata requirements facilitates effective searching, browsing, discovery, and identification for BHL’s end-users, enabling broader access and engagement with biodiversity knowledge on a global scale.

The journey to finalize BHL’s Metadata Requirements was a lengthy endeavor and bringing together once-disparate guidelines into a unified framework is the culmination of many years of work. After a Metadata Requirements Summit in 2023 and multiple rounds of Committee peer review, the first version of comprehensive BHL Metadata Requirements has been published and incorporated into BHL’s Collection Development Policy.

Additionally, embedded within these requirements is the BHL Cataloging and Metadata Committee’s formal Statement on Remediation of Harmful Language in Library Metadata, which serves as a commitment to address harmful language in library metadata, recognizing the impact of legacy language and knowledge organization systems can have on perpetuating biases. BHL actively champions inclusivity, encouraging contributors to realign vocabulary terms to ensure diverse user access. Rejecting censorship, BHL acknowledges and commends the ongoing efforts by contributing institutions in remediating outdated metadata terms. This commitment not only aligns with our dedication to diversity but also reinforces our mission to provide a comprehensive and inclusive perspective on biodiversity knowledge for a global audience.

Across the BHL Consortium, we consistently unite to uphold excellence in metadata management and recognize the individual needs of our digitization partners, encompassing factors such as staff, technical expertise, funding, and local facilities. Having comprehensive Metadata Requirements reflects the tenacious and collaborative spirit across the BHL Consortium to come together in unity and further our collective mission to provide free, worldwide access to knowledge about life on Earth.

BHL Cataloging and Metadata Committee Charge

The BHL Cataloging and Metadata Committee possesses advanced expertise in metadata standards, remediation, mapping, and cross-walking workflows. The committee is responsible for overall BHL metadata advising, curation, and validation with the overarching goal of sharing the highest quality bibliographic data outputs broadly with the bioinformatics community and the world. The task of harmonizing hundreds of years of metadata from diverse sources is a continuous, iterative activity. The Cataloging and Metadata Committee directly supports the following strategic goals:

• Ensures reliability and accuracy of the collections by curating the BHL collection 

• Defines the BHL collection as a data resource as well as a digital library to support big data approaches

• Extends and deepens metadata parsing and validation 

In closing, the Committee eagerly anticipates a year ahead filled with continued efforts to enhance BHL’s metadata quality and further integrate diverse information into the growing network of biodiversity knowledge. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to the group with your feedback. Your input will be invaluable as we strive to advance our mission and better serve our community. Thank you for your ongoing support and engagement.

As I am writing this, Melbourne is at the end of its second wave of COVID-19 and I have been separated from the library collections that I work with at Museums Victoria for six months, 25 days, 21 hours, and around 12 minutes… but who’s counting?!

The pandemic has created a lot of challenges, not least working out how to be a librarian of an overwhelmingly print-based collection from a distance, but this time working from home has also afforded me opportunities to present a handful of webinars, the most recent being a guest lecture on rare book cataloguing for library and information management students.

I can say without a doubt that this would have been a near impossible task without the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Having a number of items from the Museums Victoria Library digitised and openly available on the BHL website enabled me to access collection items virtually for students and create engaging online content showing real-life examples of features such as collation, signatures, catchwords, and provenance. These are some of the things we look for when cataloguing rare books from the hand-press era, which for Western printing spans roughly from 1440, around the time when the Gutenberg press was invented, to the early 19th century, by which time the machine age was well established and steam-powered machines dominated printing.

The two-page view on BHL allowed me to flick through books virtually in the same manner as a physical object in order to indicate some of the things we might look for when cataloguing rare books. Plate and text page 299. Collins, David. An account of the English colony in New South Wales, from its first settlement in January 1788 to August 1801. 1804. Contributed in BHL from Museums Victoria.

A central part of a bibliographical description is to record the format and the physical structure of the book. In determining a book’s collations—or in other words, how it was put together or assembled—we can look for evidence on books, including the impressions that the paper mould have left on the paper and devices used by printers to keep track of page order such as signatures and catchwords.

A catchword will show the first word on the following page and a signature will indicate how many pages are in each gathering of the book. Both generally appear near the bottom of a page and both are also useful for rare book cataloguers to check that the item they are cataloguing is not missing any pages.

Close-up of a page indicating the location of the signature and catchword. Preface. Collins, David. An account of the English colony in New South Wales, from its first settlement in January 1788 to August 1801. 1804. Contributed in BHL from Museums Victoria.

During the lecture, I used BHL to flick through David Collins’ published journal, An account of the English colony in New South Wales … (1804), where I could clearly demonstrate to the students what I am referring to when I say “collations”, “signatures” and “catchwords”, and what aspects of the book that I might record in a catalogue record.

Another thing that I touched on was provenance markings and how to record any marks of ownership, custody or location on an item. In the case of books, this can mean autographs or notes written in books, as well as bookplates and stamps—people scribble, affix or slip all sorts of things in or on books! Generally, when cataloguing, I’d aim to note anything in our copy that might deviate from the “perfect” copy, so in other words, anything that’s happened to the book after publication.

The front flyleaf of the Museums Victoria Library copy features several marks of provenance, including an acquisition number, a blind or embossed stamp near the top of the page, and an inscription. Front flyleaf. Scott, G. Firth. The romance of polar exploration. 1909. Contributed in BHL from Museums Victoria.

Once again, BHL delivered the goods on provenance markings. I was able to browse some of the 600+ volumes that Museums Victoria has contributed to find many different kinds of provenance markings, including several marks of provenance in our copy of The romance of polar exploration by G. Firth Scott (1909) as well as bookplates, annotations and even a cheeky manicule! If you are interested to know more about provenance markings in our collections, take a look at this BHL blog post from 2019 by Hayley Webster.

So yes, the pandemic has been challenging, but not always in a bad way. It has certainly forced me to be adaptable and creative around my approach to my job, and I’ve also learned to love and appreciate the digital surrogates of the books in the Museums Victoria Library as much as I do the real thing.

Map of eastern North America. Detail of engraved map by Nicolaes Jansz Visscher, made about 1655, not long after Josselyn’s first journey to the New World. Note the prominent, plump turkey. Gift of Mrs. Francis P. Garvan, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

It is a small book, palm-size, with pages of less-than-fine paper, the well-worn letters of the type sometimes carelessly inked. The sparse woodcut illustrations are child-like in their simplicity and straight-forwardness. Yet John Josselyn’s New-Englands rarities discovered, printed in London in 1672, drew me in as I went about cataloging the work. Intrigued by the title and the early date of publication, I found myself reading an account of the landscape of my past, from Boston, “down east” (that is, up the coast as represented in the above illustration) to my place of birth, and points all around. That great bibliography, The Hunt Botanical Catalogue, notes that this book is “particularly interesting to people who are fond of Maine.” Indeed. The text provides a sense of place from the 17^th century.

Having refreshed my self here [Boston] for some time, and opportunely lighting upon a passage in a Bark belonging to a Friend of my Brothers, and bound to the Eastward, I put to sea again, and on the Fifteenth of August I arrived at Black-point, otherwise called Scarborow, the habitation of my beloved Brother, being about an hundred leagues to the Eastward of Boston; here I resided eight years, and made it my business to discover all along the Natural, Physical, and Chyrurgical Rarities of the New-found World.

BHL digitized copy, supplied by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Library.

New-Englands rarities is an account of the author’s two journeys to America, the first in 1638 for several months and again in 1663 for a stay of eight years. Despite the autobiographical nature of the work, not much is known of Josselyn, “active” in cataloging parlance, from 1630 to 1675, and born around 1608 in Essex County. The author comes across as a learned, if not terribly discerning, gentleman with possibly a medical background. He describes the topography, customs and the natural history of the country, with great interest in the healing properties of organic materials from recipes used by both native Americans and colonists, leading to speculation that the Englishman was a physician. It may be Josselyn was simply well-read and the curious type. The era of European plant exploration in the New World, for both therapeutic, consumption and ornamental purposes, was underway by the time of Josselyn’s travels. There would be a ready audience for such information, particularly in a relatively accessible and inexpensive publication.

Prouts Neck. Painting by Winslow Homer (1836-1910), Smithsonian American Art Museums

“Scarborow” is the coastal area of Scarborough, incorporated as a town in 1658 in the present state of Maine. One of the area settlements was “Black-point” (originally a patent of 1500 acres) that included the rocky shoreline of present-day Prouts Neck, of artist Winslow Homer-fame (a place now known for exclusiveness). It was here that John Josselyn’s brother Henry lived and worked along the sea, rivers, stretches of salt marshes and sandy beaches. Henry Josselyn was representing the Royal grant of land, Council of Gorges’ Province of Maine, by 1636, and later served as Deputy-Governor.

There is some evidence that Henry Josselyn may have ascended the highest mountain in the Northeast, the 6,288-foot (1,917-meter) Mount Washington. His brother John, as did Giovanni da Verrazano in 1524, observed and recorded the peak (known by various names before European settlement) from shipboard in the Atlantic Ocean as “one stately mountain…surmounting the rest”:

“Fourscore miles (upon a direct line) to the Northwest of Scarborow, a Ridge of Mountains run Northwest and Northeast an hundred Leagues, known by the name of the White Mountains, upon which lieth Snow all year, and is a Land-mark twenty miles off at Sea.”

Skiing at Tuckerman’s Ravine, Mt. Washington, N. H. Watercolor by Arnold Holeywell (1923-2010). Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of the Ford Motor Company

John Josselyn’s further writings indicate that he probably also summited the mountain (as I did one June, when there was still snow on the slopes). Now a not-particularly arduous but long day’s hike in good weather along groomed trails, it was not a casual undertaking in the 1660’s. It is a volatile place with fierce, sometimes unpredictable, weather. The Josselyns probably journeyed along the magnificent Saco River, south of Scarborough, to reach the range. There John Josselyn made meteorological observations (The Mount Washington Observatory on April 12, 1934, recorded the wind at 231 miles per hour, a record that held through the 20^th century).