During 2020, the Archives team at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew developed a collaboration with the University of Roehampton, the University of the Third Age (U3A), and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), to create a model for the archive sector, which uses volunteer-driven, remote methods to transcribe and research collections, making them easily shareable and accessible using TEI-XML encoding. We wanted to create ways in which TEI could be embedded in the archive sector and managed by archivists with little experience of textual encoding, or time to carry out encoding themselves. In creating this model, we would also digitise, transcribe, encode, and make accessible in BHL one of Kew’s most important, but inaccessible volumes – the Kew Record Book. For Kew, it was important that the volume would be made fully accessible, as part of our commitment to transparency around our history and involvement in colonialism.

Kew Record Book. Folio 18. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. 1793-1809. Contributed in BHL from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

The model we created was timely, as the COVID-19 pandemic meant many institutions could no longer accommodate volunteers on-site, and remote ways of working have persisted. The Travelling Plants project built a community and model of engaging with and developing the digital capacity of older people remotely, a sector of society that particularly felt the impact of social isolation during the pandemic. We received a grant from The National Archives to carry out this project.

We split the project into four phases: transcription, TEI-XML encoding, plant names, and project celebration.

Phases of the Travelling Plants project.

We aimed for the project to be self-supporting, delivering remote training sessions, drop-in Q&As, creating protocols, and using the cloud for sharing documents. The most successful form of support was the small working groups of volunteers that we created, empowering volunteers to help each other. Transcriptions had to be checked by another member in the group, but support went far beyond this, with the groups setting up WhatsApp groups and even meeting in the Gardens once lockdown restrictions lifted.

About the Kew Record Book

Excerpts from the Kew Record Book

The Kew Record Book is a unique document in the history of botany and horticulture. It records incoming and outgoing plants at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, from 1793 to 1809. This was a period of intense activity at Kew, under the informal directorship of Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society. With the support of King George III and major trading bodies such as the East India Company, Banks sent gardeners from Kew to accompany plant consignments, collect specimens and supervise colonial botanic gardens across the globe. Botanic gardens played a central role in the establishment of British power overseas, facilitating the transfer of food crops and useful plants between colonies, and providing staging posts for horticultural specimens on their way to Kew.

The volume opens in 1793, when William Townsend Aiton succeeded his father as superintendent of Kew. Entries are in a variety of hands, noting donors and recipients of consignments, identifying plants by their Latin botanical names. Also included are a number of copies of letters sent to and from plant collectors overseas. A particular highlight is Francis Masson’s 1798 letter from New York recounting his capture by French pirates when crossing the Atlantic (folio 84).

The volume records plant exchange for a range of commercial, colonial, and diplomatic purposes and Kew’s involvement in colonialism is clearly documented. Among the most active donors to Kew was William Roxburgh, superintendent of the East India Company’s botanic garden in Calcutta (Kolkata). Roxburgh established firm and long-lasting links between the East India Company and Kew.

Regular shipments were received from plant collectors around the world. In 1793, 82 crates arrived from the new penal colony of Botany Bay in Eastern Australia (folio 7). Banks had lobbied hard for the establishment of the colony and supplied the first settlers with seeds and plants. Two Kew-trained gardeners tended the crops and collected Australian plants on behalf of Kew.

Banks was also responsible for organising one of the most well-known – indeed notorious – of plant transfers: that of the breadfruit from Tahiti to the Caribbean (1791-3). The breadfruit, Artocarpus altilis, was proposed as a suitable foodstuff for enslaved people on British-owned plantations in the West Indies (although it only became a staple food in the Caribbean post-emancipation). The Kew Record Book includes a list of plants brought back to Kew from the voyage: from Tahiti, New Guinea, St. Helena, St Vincent and Jamaica (folios 10-16). Heading the list are ‘Otaheita Plants’, some with Tahitian names, but the first entry is for ‘Bread fruit 4 plants’ (folio 10).

Plants were also used to forge diplomatic alliances. In 1795 a shipment of over 300 rare plants was sent to Maria Feodorovna, “the Great Dutchess of Russia” who, the following year, would become Empress consort of Russia (folio 38). The batch was headed by the spectacular bird of paradise Strelitzia regina, named in honour of Queen Charlotte (of the house of Mecklenburg-Strelitz).

With its detailed inventories and multiple correspondents, the volume offers an invaluable resource to reconstruct botanical networks and chart the routes of plants across the globe.

View the complete Record Book in BHL.

The Encoding

To make the Kew Record Book as accessible and searchable as possible, we decided to train volunteers to encode their transcriptions. We chose to follow the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), an international consortium whose XML standard is used globally to create digital texts. As a markup standard based in natural language, TEI-XML represented a relatively friendly way of enhancing the Travelling Plants volunteers’ digital skillset.

Given the limited timeframe of the project, we didn’t aim to produce a complete digital edition of the Record Book. Instead, our goal was to develop and test a model for engaging volunteers in the encoding of archival texts; to refine the model through testing and dialogue; and to produce guidance that could be used by other archive-based projects. Travelling Plants volunteers were given the option of learning TEI-XML and encoding the text after they had begun transcribing and annotating it. Almost all tried their hand at encoding. Approximately half shifted their focus to encoding during the project’s final phase, while the others completed the transcription and annotation of the volume.

Because TEI-XML was new to all of the volunteers, we created detailed written guidance complemented by ten training videos. Three real-time tech support sessions on Zoom gave volunteers opportunities to share their learning with one another and to ask questions about the most technically challenging aspects of encoding the Record Book’s many types of entries. Volunteers then worked in teams to produce their digital edition.

By the end of the project, approximately 100 pages had been encoded in a way that made the Record Book easily searchable by the names (in all forms) of plants, people, ships, and institutions, as well as by places that can be plotted on digital maps. The digital edition and training materials will be made available via the Travelling Plants website, as soon as final revisions are complete. In the words of one volunteer, “I never thought I would enjoy coding but now I find I don’t want to stop!”

In the end-of-project evaluation, our volunteers said making history accessible and deciphering the handwriting were enjoyable parts of the project. However, the group work was the universally most enjoyed:

“I’ve really enjoyed working on the transcriptions, in particular the research and ‘detective’ work to firstly figure out what a letter or word is and then the investigation into the people and places which really brings the archive alive, and it’s been lovely to work with my group and get to know them.”

“It was a gift in lockdown to have something else to focus on other than the virus, masks, social distancing.”

What the volunteers found most enjoyable about the Travelling Plants project

The least enjoyable part was unanimously reading the handwriting!

By developing and sharing our protocols and training resources, we aim to empower other archivists to work with volunteers to create open access, shareable transcriptions that will help open their collections to the world.

This post is part of a series from the Ernst Mayr Library exploring the digitization and transcription of ornithologist William Brewster’s archival materials and the insights and scholarship made possible thanks to this work.

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.

As discussed in Part One of this series, EMLA began digitization of its Brewster collection in 2012. In 2014, Library staff began transcription of Brewster’s digitized journals and diaries to produce a corpus of text files for the Purposeful Gaming and BHL project. As part of this project, EMLA was charged with leading an effort to select an appropriate open source transcription tool. At this time (early 2014), manuscript materials such as field notes and correspondence were beginning to appear in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) thanks to other grant-funded efforts among BHL members. Tools under consideration for Purposeful Gaming were thus also viewed as potential long-term transcription solutions for libraries contributing such materials to BHL.

After four months of research and testing, the grant partners selected DigiVol, a crowdsourcing transcription platform developed by the Australian Museum in collaboration with the Atlas of Living Australia, and EMLA staff set up a project space for the Library. One significant advantage of DigiVol is that it was developed specifically for the transcription of natural history materials such as specimen labels and field notes. Thus, there was the advantage of a pre-existing community of volunteers both interested in and adept at transcribing such items.

At the end of the Purposeful Gaming project (November 2015), volunteers and library staff had transcribed 12 volumes of Brewster’s journals and diaries, totaling 3,470 pages. That left 37,000 pages of Brewster’s writings in our collection awaiting transcription. Over the next four years, progress in the transcription work at EMLA was relatively slow at an average of 1,262 pages transcribed per year. During this time, EMLA had only a single, albeit enthusiastic, part-time library assistant who was able to dedicate one-third of her time or less to the project due to other higher-priority tasks.

On March 16, 2020, Harvard University staff began working remotely. Expecting a large influx of volunteers due to the quarantine in Australia, and anticipating an increase in staff availability at participating institutions, DigiVol administrators sent out a call for more materials to be uploaded for transcription. Working remotely, the author had the time available to regularly upload new volumes of Brewster’s diaries for transcription, respond to questions posted by volunteer transcribers, and validate completed transcriptions. Another EMLA staff member was able to offer several hours per week of her time as well. This was fortuitous as the volunteers were, indeed, ramping up their transcription activity, completing each diary volume in about two weeks time.

As the pandemic wore on, greater numbers of staff across the Harvard University library system were in need of work that could be done remotely. In response to this need, Harvard Library established a work share program whereby libraries in need of help could offer temporary assignments or projects to those in need of some additional work. By this time (September 2020), the volunteer transcribers were making so much progress that we were falling behind in the work of validating transcriptions. EMLA thus posted its project via the work share program, and we were fortunate to obtain the assistance of two library colleagues able to devote several hours each week to the work of transcription and validation.

With a total of 4 staff members and an average of 11 DigiVol volunteers (up from a previous average of 7) working on the project, more pages of Brewster’s writings were transcribed in 2020 than in any of the previous four years, as shown in the graphic below. There was a 242% increase in the number of pages transcribed over 2019, and a 165% increase over the average yearly number of pages transcribed from 2016 through 2019.

Number of pages transcribed per year, 2016-2020.

Transcriptions in the Biodiversity Heritage Library

The fruit of our transcribers’ labors began to materialize in 2018 when BHL developers introduced transcription import functionality to BHL. When member libraries began uploading transcribed pages of field notebooks and correspondence, the potential for access and discovery became readily apparent. Full-text indexing and searching of transcribed manuscript materials was now possible. For example, in researching the previous blog post about Robert Gilbert, the author was able to search for the name Gilbert in several transcribed volumes of Brewster’s journals. The result of such a search in Brewster’s 1898 journal is shown below.

Searching for the name Gilbert in the 1898 volume of Brewster’s Journals retrieves 42 references to Robert Gilbert in this volume. The search results are shown in the right-hand panel of the BHL book viewer.

Like most field notebooks, Brewster’s diaries and journals are replete with scientific names. In order for these to be recognized by BHL’s name-finding utility, Global Names Architecture (GNA), they must be carefully transcribed. Transcription tutorials for the Brewster project in DigiVol ask that scientific names be given extra care, expanding abbreviations and correcting misspellings where possible. Our team of volunteers and staff have done an exquisite job of accurately transcribing scientific names, sometimes even doing research when unsure of the correct spelling of a name. Some of the transcribers so enjoy delving into Brewster’s world that they frequently research people, localities, or unfamiliar terms used in his writings as well.

A species observation list from Brewster’s 1900 Journal with transcription of species names and observations in the text panel on the right. Note the scientific names on the lower left, extracted from the transcription text by Global Names Architecture (GNA). Prior to addition of the transcription text, no names were found by GNA.

The end result is that the myriad of ornithological taxa mentioned in Brewster’s writings are being indexed in BHL. Thus a search across the full BHL repository for a specific taxon retrieves results from field notes and correspondence as well as the published literature. The resulting species bibliography will thus lead researchers to field observations, specimen collecting accounts, habitat and weather descriptions, and other content that may not be included in secondary sources.

A search for Chaetura pelagica (Chimney Swift) across the full BHL repository retrieves instances of this taxon in Brewster’s transcribed Journals as well as the published literature.

Because of the hard work of our volunteer transcribers, full transcriptions of thousands of pages of Brewster’s diaries, journals, and correspondence are now being added to BHL, making this content available for text analysis, data mining, digital scholarship, and the creation of new information. Connections with similar collections in other institutions will likely be discovered as more primary source material is digitized and transcribed. Brewster’s meticulous record of species occurrences, habitat, landscape ecology, and weather can help in addressing the current climate and biodiversity crises. His record of historical events and his account of the work of Robert Gilbert might be used in social justice or other humanitarian research efforts. The staff of the EMLA are deeply indebted to the team of volunteers and our two Harvard Library colleagues who have given so much of their time and energy to help unlock the riches of the Brewster collection for the benefit of all.

If you would like to help transcribe Brewster’s writings, there is still plenty of work to do. We will soon complete his diaries and journals after which we will begin transcribing his extensive collection of correspondence. If you are interested, please visit our project page.

The most-viewed image in the BHL Flickr as of February 2021. Vincent, Henriette Antoinette. Études de fleurs et de fruits. c1820. Art by Vincent. Contributed in BHL from Chicago Botanic Garden, Lenhardt Library. Link in Flickr. Link in BHL.

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.

The second most-viewed image in the BHL Flickr as of February 2021. Séguy, Emile-Allain. Papillons. 1925. Art by Séguy. Contributed in BHL from Smithsonian Libraries and Archives. Link in Flickr. Link in BHL.

Thanks to this impressive work, our Flickr collection now includes over 250,000 free images dating from the 16th-20th centuries and representing a range of biodiversity subjects, from plants and animals to fungi, microscopic organisms, and even artifacts like tools made from shells. All images in the BHL Flickr are free to browse, download, and reuse. You can learn more about reusing images from Flickr on the BHL About site.

This post features some of the most popular (by views) images in the BHL Flickr.

The third most-viewed image in the BHL Flickr as of February 2021. Möller, Alfred. Brasilische Pilzblumen. 1895. Art by Richard Volk. Contributed in BHL from The LuEsther T Mertz Library, the New York Botanical Garden. Link in Flickr. Link in BHL.

Images in Flickr are curated by album and collection. Each album corresponds to a particular volume in BHL and contains all of the full page images from that volume. Images and albums are further curated into collections on particular subjects, from botanical art to marine species, gardening, endangered species, and more. We also have collections associated with BHL’s various social media campaigns, including Her Natural History (featuring a collection of illustrations by women artists, each tagged with the name of the artist), Monsters Are Real (featuring images of mythical creatures like hydra, sea serpents, and kraken), Color Our Collections (featuring black and white illustrations perfect for printing and coloring), and Fossil Stories (featuring a wealth of historic paleontological art).

Flickr helps improve image discoverability for BHL, not only by making it easier to browse images from BHL’s collection of over 59 million pages, but also by providing an opportunity for the public to help enhance the metadata for these images through crowdsourcing, making it easier to search the images by species, artist, geographic location, and more! Visit our About site to learn more about how to search images in the BHL Flickr.

The fourth most-viewed image in the BHL Flickr as of February 2021. Bird World Magazine, v.1 (1906-1907). Art by John Gerrard Keulemans. Contributed in BHL from the University Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Link in Flickr. Link in BHL.

Through our Flickr Tagging Crowdsourcing Project, we invite anyone to help add tags to Flickr images that describe the species depicted, identify the artist of the image, or indicate the geographic location in which the depicted species lives. To date, over 46,000 images, or about 18% of our Flickr collection, has been tagged by the public. This is an incredible accomplishment, but don’t worry—there’s still plenty of images in need of tags. And the best part? This is an educational activity that you can do from home!

We are so grateful to all of our volunteers who have helped tag our images. Thanks to you, these images are more accessible and discoverable for others to support their research and educational activities.

We welcome anyone to join us in tagging images in our Flickr. Learn how to get started with these detailed tagging instructions.

The fifth most-viewed image in the BHL Flickr as of February 2021. Shuckard, William Edward. British Bees. 1866. Art by Edward William Robinson. Contributed in BHL from MBLWHOI Library. Link in Flickr. Link in BHL.

We invite you to explore our image collections on Flickr today. Thank you to all of our incredible partners who have helped build this amazing resource, and to all of our volunteers who have helped improve it through image tagging. We encourage you to download and reuse the images for your own educational, artistic, personal, and professional uses, and to help us improve the collections by participating in our tagging project.

Enjoy immersing yourself in the beauty of nature through art!

On 23 March 2020, the U.K. went into its first national lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Social distancing and teleworking became the norm, and the walls of our homes became, in many ways, the boundaries of our individual worlds.

Amateur mycologist Clare Blencowe was eager to find a positive distraction from the realities of life during a pandemic. The Biodiversity Heritage Library’s open access collections, which for Blencowe had become a welcome refuge from the continuous onslaught of negative news articles, now became the inspiration for a new, socially distanced way to connect with other fungi lovers—in the form of “The Mycological Book Club”, an online, Twitter-based book club with a particular focus on open access literature.

#MycoBookClub logo, designed by illustrator Kelsey Sconberg of Mossy Stone Media.

“We were at the beginning of a national lockdown,” recalls Blencowe. “All social events were cancelled, and I found myself endlessly scrolling through increasingly doom-laden news, feeling increasingly doom-y. #MycoBookClub started as a simple distraction, an opportunity for a shared experience: people reading the same book and discussing it on Twitter at an allotted time.”

@MycoBookClub on Twitter.

Blencowe brought her idea to life by founding the @MycoBookClub Twitter account, establishing the #MycoBookClub hashtag to facilitate discussion, and setting a recurring date and time for book club meetings—the first Tuesday of the month at 7:30pm (GMT) on Twitter. She then scheduled the first #MycoBookClub meeting for 5 May 2020.

That first meeting, which brought together just a handful of followers, was dedicated to Mordecai Cubitt Cooke’s Rust, Smut, Mildew & Mould: An Introduction to the Study of Microscopic Fungi (Fifth ed. 1886), which club members accessed through BHL.

Welcome to #MycoBookClub, folks! It’s a pleasant evening here at @MycoBookClub headquarters in Sussex, England.

We’re talking about ‘MICROSCOPIC FUNGI: Rust, Smut, Mildew & Mould’ by M.C. Cooke (1886). You can find it at: https://t.co/7WO005ZS5Q pic.twitter.com/GxWzmYhnxg

— The Mycological Book Club (@MycoBookClub) May 5, 2020

With passages celebrating the beauty and wonder of the often unheeded nature in our own backyards and neighborhoods, the title was a fitting—and motivating—choice for an audience confined to their homes and local natural surroundings.

As Cooke writes,

“We might traverse the primeval forests of the new world, and explore the unknown regions of the old, and not encounter so much to excite our admiration, or cause our wonder, as lies about our feet at home; marvels which we tread beneath our feet, or kick from our path, because they appear to be only rotten sticks, withered grass, and decaying leaves.”

“Cooke’s writing provided inspiration for enjoying nature near home,” shares Blencowe. “I felt myself lifted by his soaring rhetoric.”

Amateur mycologist Clare Blencowe, founder of the #MycoBookClub. Photo courtesy of Clare Blencowe.

#MycoBookClub has allowed Blencowe to share and grow her interest in mycology—an interest that began in earnest about five years ago when a new job as manager of the Sussex Biodiversity Record Centre, and the much shorter commute that came with it, provided her with newfound time to pursue her interest in fungi. While she considers mycology a hobby, her involvement in the field has grown over the years through membership in the British Mycological Society, where she was recently elected to their Field Mycology and Conservation Committee.

BHL helped nurture this love of mycology well before the birth of #MycoBookClub. Blencowe’s first in-depth interaction with the Library occurred in April 2019, when her discovery of a small brown fungus cup in the woods led her to seek confirmation of its identity—which she believed to be the Anemone Cup Dumontinia tuberosa—by posting to the British Mycological Society Facebook group. UK-based mycologist Lukas Large responded to her post with the link to a color plate for comparison from Émile Boudier’s Icones Mycologicæ (1905-1910) in BHL.

Illustration of Dumontinia tuberosa, plate 477. Boudier, Émile. Icones Mycologicæ (1905-1910), v.3. Art by Boudier. Contributed in BHL from the University Library, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.

“The information contained in this beautiful colour plate far surpassed anything I had access to in my field guides at home,” shares Blencowe. “It helped me to understand the structure and features of this fungus I had in front of me, and spurred me on to take a closer look at it under the microscope. That experience really opened my eyes to what a useful resource the books in BHL can be: to inform observation and help identify species in a present day context. Sure, species concepts and nomenclature may have moved on, but the detail with which mycologists such as Boudier recorded their observations is a lesson in itself.”

Since that eye-opening experience, Blencowe continues to turn to BHL as a resource to support her interests in mycology, reading titles online and downloading select pages and images as needed. Some of her favorite aspects of the Library include a good search functionality, user-friendly online reading and content downloading, high quality scans, clear copyright information, easily-shareable direct page links, and the image collections in Flickr. Since founding #MycoBookClub, she uses BHL almost every week.

We’ve talked already here at #MycoBookClub about M.C. Cooke, but tonight we’re also feasting our eyes on ‘Selecta Fungorum Carpologia’ by The Brothers Tulasne.

You can find their illustrations in the Biodiversity Heritage Library: https://t.co/DN4Hi816XE pic.twitter.com/buaU9fMTa4

— The Mycological Book Club (@MycoBookClub) June 2, 2020

“I love the little bookish details that are preserved in BHL: the gilt decoration on a publication’s cover, ornate book plates, library stamps, barely-decipherable pencil marks and blank pages uniquely speckled with foxing,” shares Blencowe. “The scanned pages hold so much more than simply the words and the illustrations. They do your soul good.”

A reminder that it’s #MycoBookClub night tonight, from 7:30pm UK time.

We’re trying out a theme this evening: illustration ?https://t.co/Bvx0nDHY08

— The Mycological Book Club (@MycoBookClub) November 3, 2020

In the months following the club’s first meeting in May 2020, #MycoBookClub continued to grow, amassing more followers and receiving attention in outlets like The British Mycological Society Newsletter and IMA Fungus. Blencowe established a “virtual bookshelf” to maintain a list of all the books that #MycoBookClub had discussed—many of which were accessed through BHL.

#MycoBookClub “virtual bookshelf.” Source: https://mycobookclub.blogspot.com

“The more time I spend in the Library, the more amazed I am by the vast amount of literature it contains—and the neat way it is organised and presented,” lauds Blencowe. “BHL also provides the opportunity to take a deep dive into the source material for a fascinating glimpse into the machinery of global science in the 19th century.”

While she’s enjoyed many titles in BHL, a recent favorite is Anna Maria Hussey’s Illustrations of British Mycology (1847-55), which was the subject of the July 2020 #MycoBookClub meeting. Published under the name Mrs. T.J. Hussey, the two-volume work illustrates and describes species collected by Hussey and her sister, Frances Reed.

#MycoBookClub returns Tues 7 July, 7:30pm (UK time).

Thought we could take a broader look at the fungal kingdom this month with ‘Illustrations of British Mycology’ by Anna Maria Hussey (1847).

You can read it in the @BioDivLibrary, here: https://t.co/4BPXfDyWhd pic.twitter.com/icBcIRd1xM

— The Mycological Book Club (@MycoBookClub) June 7, 2020

“Hussey writes from the perspective of an enthusiastic amateur which I found both highly relatable and genuinely inspiring,” affirms Blencowe. “She writes in a chatty, conversational style which is peppered with fascinating contemporary details (such as her observation that Boletus subtomentosus has ‘the texture of a Limerick glove’) and timeless wisdom (‘life passes in gaining experience for ourselves…till at last we have acquired the wisdom to guide us safely…’).”

Illustration of Suillellus luridus, plate 35. Hussey, Anna Maria. Illustrations of British Mycology, ser.2 (1855). Art by Hussey. Contributed in BHL from The New York Botanical Garden, LuEsther T. Mertz Library. Explore all illustrations from Illustrations of British Mycology in the BHL Flickr.

Blencowe has gathered and shared via @MycoBookClub some of her favorite elements from Hussey’s work, including her approach to mycology, her discussion of fungus names, her commentary on fungi in nature, her descriptions of fungal habitats, and miscellaneous myco-chatter. Illustrations of British Mycologyis also noteworthy as a rare female-authored work in the bibliography of historic mycological literature.

“Browsing the historic biodiversity literature, it is very noticeable that certain perspectives predominate,” notes Blencowe. “The books are mostly written by men—white men. So it was a particular joy to come across Hussey’s book. I’m keen to explore ways that @MycoBookClub can provide a platform for different perspectives and respectfully champion Indigenous knowledge of fungi.”

While ours may still be a socially-distanced world, initiatives like #MycoBookClub remind us that there are still opportunities to connect with others, share our passions, and nurture a community. And while the news may still be filled with dire headlines, naturalists like Mordecai Cubitt Cooke and Anna Maria Hussey remind us that we can still find solace in nature close to home and in unexpected places, if we are just willing to look.

To quote Hussey: “The world is full of beauty that we pass by unheeded.”

Illustration of Crinipellis scabella, plate 68. Hussey, Anna Maria. Illustrations of British Mycology, ser.1 (1847). Art by Frances Reed. Contributed in BHL from The New York Botanical Garden, LuEsther T. Mertz Library. This plate accompanies Hussey’s quote: “The world is full of beauty that we pass by unheeded.”

Everyone is welcome to join the #MycoBookClub. Follow @MycoBookClub for updates and meeting information, and join the discussion the first Tuesday of each month at 7:30pm (GMT) using the #MycoBookClub hashtag on Twitter.

As we come to the end of 2020, we reflect on the challenges that have profoundly impacted us as societies and individuals this year, requiring us to rethink how we do our jobs, interact with friends and colleagues, and access and share information. Facing these unprecedented challenges together, we continue to work with our partners to ensure that you have free access to the resources you need to empower your research—no matter where you are.

With many of our partners working virtually this year, we’ve focused on projects to improve our digital collections remotely. We’ve uploaded previously digitized and born-digital content, including recent issues of publications like Records of the Australian Museum, Journal of the Royal Society of Western Australia, and American Museum Novitates. We’ve improved our metadata, reconciling duplicate entries for and editing over 2,000 author names and defining tens of thousands of additional articles and correspondence in the collection. We’ve also enhanced page-level descriptions for over 3,000 volumes since March. This work includes articulating illustrations within these volumes, allowing us to upload over 75,000 new images to the BHL Flickr over the past nine months—bringing our total Flickr collection to over 240,000 free nature images.

This work ensures that BHL continues to support your research needs…anytime, anywhere. It is thanks to the generosity and support of our community that we were able to pivot quickly and meet the needs of our users in a rapidly-changing environment throughout 2020. Please consider making a gift in support of BHL this Giving Tuesday, and help ensure that we can rise to meet whatever comes our way, together.

From Us to You: The Gift of Free Nature Art

Your support makes it possible for everyone to discover the wonders of biodiversity…not just through text, but through art as well! Visit the BHL Flickr to explore over 240,000 nature images—all free to download and reuse.

Visit Flickr Today!

Visit our About site for tips on how to search and download the images in Flickr. Keep scrolling to explore a selection of some of the most popular images on the BHL Flickr.

Acanthophoenix crinita. Flore des serres et des jardins de l’Europe. v. 16 (1865-67). Contributed in BHL from the Missouri Botanical Garden, Peter H. Raven Library. View in Flickr.

Taf. III (Chaceon affinis). Wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse der Deutschen Tiefsee-Expedition auf dem Dampfer “Valdivia” 1898-1899. Bd. 6 (1904). Contributed in BHL from the MBLWHOI Library. View in Flickr.

Taf. 100 (Antelopes). Kunstformen der Natur. (1899-1904). Contributed in BHL from Smithsonian Libraries. View in Flickr.

Tab. 63. Tabulae phytographicae, analysin generum plantarum exhibentes. v. 2 (1804). Contributed in BHL from the New York Botanical Garden, LuEsther T. Mertz Library. View in Flickr.

King parrot and Pennant’s parakeet. The illustrated book of canaries and cage-birds, British and foreign. (c. 1878). Contributed in BHL from the Harvard University, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Ernst Mayr Library. View in Flickr.

Tab. XII (dragons). Historiae naturalis de quadrupedibus libri. (1657). Contributed in BHL from Smithsonian Libraries. View in Flickr.

This year, as organizations around the world have done in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) held its annual conference virtually. With a mix of online working sessions, webinar-style symposia, presentations, panel discussions, and recorded presentations, this year’s conference was held across two separate periods—the first dedicated to working sessions during the week of 21-25 September 2020 and the second to symposia and panel sessions the week of 19-23 October 2020.

As the TDWG 2020 Annual Conference website states, the conference “serve two purposes:

• to provide a forum for developing, refining, and extending standards in response to new challenges and opportunities;
• and to provide a showcase for biodiversity informatics – much of which relies on the standards created by TDWG and other organizations.”

You can view the complete list of working session and symposia and discussion session descriptions on the TDWG website. Conference sessions were also recorded and are available for viewing on the TDWG YouTube channel.

BHL Symposium at TDWG 2020

On 20 October 2020 as part of the TDWG 2020 virtual conference, BHL hosted a symposium, “SYM03 Enhancing Connections With the Global Neighbourhood Through Expanding Partnerships”, organized by Constance Rinaldo (Librarian of the Ernst Mayr Library, Harvard and Chair of the BHL Executive Committee) and Colleen Funkhouser (BHL Program Manager, Smithsonian Libraries).

The symposium consisted of four talks, covering topics including building BHL’s technical strategy, digital object identifiers (DOIs), taxonomic name finding services, and BHL’s response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. See more details about the symposium and each talk below.

Organizers, presenters, and facilitators for the BHL Symposium at TDWG 2020. Top, L to R: Martin Kalfatovic, Nicole Kearney, Ely Wallis; Middle, L to R: Holly Little, Constance Rinaldo, Colleen Funkhouser; Bottom, L to R: Elisa Herrmann, Jane Smith, Joel Richard. Image courtesy of Nicole Kearney.

SYM03 Enhancing Connections With the Global Neighbourhood Through Expanding Partnerships
Abstract: The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is more than a digital library, it is a key resource for data related to biodiversity. Data such as museum specimens, taxonomic names, environmental and geolocation variables is embedded in the published and unpublished literature found in BHL. Over the past year, BHL has developed a five year strategic plan designed to bring more focus on data, technology and partnerships. BHL is already well-established within the global bibliographical knowledge base. The plan for the symposium is to highlight some new directions and identify synergies and connections with current, new and potential partners in the biodiversity knowledge infrastructure.

• Building the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s Technical Strategy — Elisa Herrmann (Museum für Naturkunde Berlin)
  • Presentation Slides
• Discovering the Platypus: From Its Scientific Description to Its DOI — Nicole Kearney (BHL Australia, Museums Victoria)
  • Presentation Slides
• Improving Taxonomic Name Finding in the Biodiversity Heritage Library — Joel Richard (Smithsonian Libraries)
  • Presentation Slides
• The Biodiversity Heritage Library Response to the Global COVID-19 Pandemic — Delivered by Martin Kalfatovic (BHL Secretariat, Smithsonian Libraries). Co-authors: Constance Rinaldo (Ernst Mayr Library, Harvard); Jane Smith (Library and Archives, Natural History Museum, London); David Iggulden (Library, Art & Archives at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew); Colleen Funkhouser (BHL Secretariat, Smithsonian Libraries).
  • Presentation Slides

Goal 2 of BHL’s 2020-2025 Strategic Plan focuses on developing the Library’s tools and services. During her talk, Building the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s Technical Strategy, Elisa Herrmann (Museum für Naturkunde Berlin) discussed the five objectives of that goal and BHL’s plans to implement those objectives. Image courtesy of Grace Costantino.

As Nicole Kearney (BHL Australia, Museums Victoria) shared during her talk, Discovering the Platypus: From Its Scientific Description to Its DOI, the first scientific description of the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) now has a DOI (https://doi.org/10.5962/p.304567), assigned by BHL. This allows anyone to easily cite this description directly and enables easier tracking of those citations. Image courtesy of Grace Costantino.

During his talk, Improving Taxonomic Name Finding in the Biodiversity Heritage Library, Joel Richard (Smithsonian Libraries) shared some of the benefits of implementing the new Global Names gnfinder tool to support taxonomic name finding in BHL. Image courtesy of Grace Costantino.

During the presentation The Biodiversity Heritage Library Response to the Global COVID-19 Pandemic, Martin Kalfatovic (BHL Secretariat, Smithsonian Libraries) shared statements from partners about BHL’s impact during the pandemic. Image courtesy of Grace Costantino.

The symposium was well-received, with approximately 100 people attending. The talks sparked interesting discussions, with questions around such topics as opportunities for Wikidata integration; supporting annotations as part of a future IIIF integration; strategies for improving optical character recognition (OCR); development of visualizations using BHL data; identification of additional useful data access points, such as collection and specimen codes and locality names; and potential strategies for supporting third-party application development using BHL data, such as through researcher prizes and challenges.

You can view a recording of the symposium on YouTube and all session presentation files in this Google folder.