All posts tagged with citizen-science

In the face of climate change and environmental challenges, understanding and documenting Earth’s biodiversity is essential. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) serves as a global repository for biodiversity data, playing a pivotal role in this critical mission of safeguarding our planet’s biodiversity. Species occurrence data sourced from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) provides insights into species distributions, behaviors, and interactions much deeper into time, offering key species baseline data required to effectively address the climate crisis. Without accurate and comprehensive data in GBIF, our collective ability to track environmental changes and make informed decisions is severely hampered.

As a GBIF participant node, BHL is committed to sharing biodiversity data openly, adhering to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics) data principles, and collaborating with a global network of biodiversity organizations to bolster and build capacity to strengthen the biodiversity information infrastructure. To honor our commitments, technical staff from BHL are working to establish a scalable data pipeline of occurrence data currently trapped in archival field notes, journals, letters, correspondence, and other primary source materials. The journey has been an arduous one due to poor OCR (optical character recognition) data quality for BHL’s sub-corpus of handwritten materials.

Join us on 25 March 2021 (1-3pm ET) for Wikipedia & Women in Science: Smithsonian Groundbreakers Edit-a-thon, an online Wikipedia editing workshop hosted in conjunction with the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative and the Smithsonian Institution Archives of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives.

Many of us have searched for silver linings during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2021. For many in the library and museum profession, one positive outcome of the mandatory transition to remote work has been the resurrection of some long-postponed projects. These are activities put on hold during normal times in deference to ever-proliferating, higher-priority onsite tasks. One such project in the Ernst Mayr Library and Archives (EMLA) of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) at Harvard University, is transcription of the digitized journals and diaries of William Brewster.

Over a quarter of a million nature images are now freely available through the BHL Flickr!

Since 2011, we’ve been making many of the illustrations from BHL’s collection available via Flickr. While it has long been a community favorite amongst our audiences, in 2020 our Flickr’s popularity increased significantly when it received considerable media attention in outlets including Colossal, Laughing Squid, Český rozhlas, ZME Science, Cultura Inquieta, Hyperallergic, Graffica, Smithsonian Magazine, Open Culture, la Repubblica, Genbeta, My Modern Met (en Español), eCulture Greece, Daily Geek Show, Вокруг Света, Atlas Obscura, Shifter, Lifehacker, Indiehoy, Microsiervos, and Vice. As a result of this publicity in February 2020, we saw a 518% increase in daily views on Flickr images (2.5 million daily views compared to an average of 400,000) and an over 100% increase in visits and unique visitors to BHL. This popularity continued throughout the year, culminating in over 343 million views on images in 2020 alone—a 123% increase over 2019, bringing our all-time views to over 902 million!

Last year also offered a unique opportunity to substantially build our Flickr collection. With many of our partners working virtually in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we focused on projects to improve our digital collections remotely. This work included uploading images to Flickr. In 2020, over 40 BHL partner staff and volunteers contributed to the upload of over 90,000 new images to Flickr—a nearly 200% increase in images uploaded compared to 2019.

Since July 2016, the papers of taxonomic botanist John Torrey (1796-1873) have been the focus of a digitization and crowdsourced transcription project at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG). Digitizing and Transcribing the John Torrey Papers, organized in coordination with the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, was created in an effort to digitize and make virtually accessible the correspondence of John Torrey and his colleagues, specifically letters received by Dr. Torrey.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) has added functionality to allow BHL Partners to upload transcriptions in place of the automatically-generated OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for archival materials digitized in BHL. This functionality supports transcriptions generated as part of Partner crowdsourcing projects on Smithsonian Transcription Center, DigiVol, and From the Page.

In the mid-nineteenth century, microscopy became immensely popular with European and American naturalists. As microscopes became more affordable, microscopy societies were established, and numerous microscopy journals were launched and widely distributed. Many microscopy publications were richly illustrated, trying to recreate the “world of wonder and beauty” seen through the microscope.

To this day, so many nineteenth-century publications on microscopy remain that they can hardly be analyzed by just a handful of historians. Therefore, the MUSTS research group at Maastricht University launched Worlds of Wonder, an online crowdsourcing project, on the Zooniverse citizen science platform. The MUSTS researchers behind Worlds of Wonder, Lea Beiermann, Cyrus Mody and Raf De Bont, ask citizen scientists to help them classify nineteenth-century microscopy illustrations, assign keywords to the illustrations to make them searchable, and identify the people who made them.