Peek of the dome of the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore via a side street

The Biodiversity Information Standards group, also known as TDWG, holds an annual conference every year in a different city around the globe.  This year it was held in Florence Italy from October 28th 2013-November 1st 2013.  It was my first opportunity to attend the TDWG conference.   The conference theme was “virtual communities for biodiversity science” which spoke to me of the increasing opportunities in sharing and connecting biodiversity data via the semantic web environment.

I particularly enjoyed the keynote talk by Eric Meyer of the Oxford Internet Institute where researchers study the social implications of the Internet from different domain perspectives.  Meyer explained why science and research are growing more collaborative and computational due to funding, technology, and the growing complexity of tasks.  I also attended the Image Interest Group’s multimedia resources task group where the discussion was on the next steps for the Audubon Core data standard and its recent ratification by the executive committee.  Having been involved in data standards work for the past 10 years with the VRA Core data standard I can appreciate what a huge milestone that is.  I discovered some interesting parallels between the data models of Audubon Core and VRA Core.  For instance, Audubon Core models species which can have one or more multimedia resources (e.g. images, video, audio, etc.) while VRA Core models works (art objects) which can have 1 or more still images (i.e. various views or details of the object).

Interior of the dome of the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore (aka Il Duomo). Filippo Brunelleschi designed the dome, Giorgio Vasari and Federico Zucarri painted the dome with a representations from The Last Judgement.

A symposium on “Semantics and Biodiversity” was very useful to me.  This was a series of three 90 minute sessions of which I was able to attend only the first, related to “Technologies, reasoning, and annotation”  This session presented work on how to prepare Darwin Core encoded data, collection data, and specimen data to be more semantic web ready.  The symposium also included a “Primer on Semantic Technologies” –  a great overview of the practical underpinnings of the semantic web which can often feel very abstract and theoretical.

I was lucky to have had the opportunity not only to attend TDWG but to also to present as part of the symposium “Crafting the future of a global biodiversity library for diverse community’s needs”.  There I talked about the NEH-funded Art of Life project which is an effort to identify and describe the hidden visual images found within the pages of the BHL corpus. I gave an update on the progress of the project, details on the algorithms and schema, and explained the benefits to the biodiversity community.

Even though my experience overall of TDWG was positive I do have some suggestions for the program planners of the conference.  I would recommend providing opportunities for newcomers to ease their way into a new organization.  For example, give overviews or introductory sessions about the standards that TDWG creates and manages.  Many of the data standard discussions were at a very detailed level by folks who have been doing this work for years.  I would also suggest partnering newbies up with folks who have been long time attendees so that they can show them the ropes and give them an understanding of the workings of a fairly complex organizational structure.  They can also help introduce them to other participants.  Lastly, have the leadership provide a breakfast or coffee just for newcomers.  This makes them feel welcome and demonstrates that the leadership recognizes the importance of new voices and ideas for future sustainability of the organization.

Fresco from the basilica of San Miniato al Monte

I couldn’t imagine a better way to get introduced to TDWG than at a setting as enchanting as Florence Italy! It was a spectacular backdrop for a stimulating conference.   Admittedly it wasn’t always easy to sit through sessions and working group meetings all day long knowing just outside the hotel beckoned Renaissance art masterpieces from Michelangelo’s David to Brunelleschi’s dome for the Duomo.  But I managed to absorb as much of the conference as I could and still squeeze in some time for art, architecture, and the daily gelato.  It was a great experience and I hope to be back at TDWG next year for the conference in Nairobi, Kenya.

Left to right: Martin Kalfatovic, Connie Rinaldo, Trish Rose-Sandler, Lucy Waruingi, William Ulate, Jiri Frank

Six members of the Global BHL community participated in the symposium, “Crafting the Future of a Global Biodiversity Heritage Library for Diverse Communities’ Needs” at the 2013 TDWG Conference in Florence, Italy.

The symposium took place on 30 October 2013 and was attended by over 50 TDWG participants.

A key portion of the symposium was the closing talk by Connie Rinaldo (Harvard/Museum of Comparative Zoology) which called for feedback on the BHL from the TDWG community.

This symposium will focus on strategies for creating, expanding and maintaining a multinational digital library programme; digitisation platforms, standards and services; creating value-added features for discipline-specific communities; use of social media and outreach to increase use and build new audiences; and migration from projects to sustainable programmes.

This session will include presentations from a spectrum of partners from different project-, country-, and continent- collaborators sharing their experiences on facing the mentioned topics of this Symposium and promote a discussion on next steps to improve the needs of scientists.

Martin R. Kalfatovic  (Smithsonian Libraries / BHL)
A Current Overview of the Biodiversity Heritage Library
This presentation will provide a general overview of recent BHL activities and the BHL’s engagement with taxonomic communities. It will include an overview of how BHL’s focus on new vision, mission and goals help to build important tools and services that will help BHL better serve the taxonomic and other communities. Changes to the organizational structure, global activities, technical development and content acquisition will be introduced and covered in more detail by the other panelists; additionally, new content types for BHL in the future will include Field Books, a more robust discovery of illustrations, and new content from global partners.

Trish Rose-Sandler (Missouri Botanical Garden / BHL)
Finding a goldmine of natural history illustrations within BHL texts: the Art of Life project
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) has now achieved a critical mass of digitized historic texts – over 41 million pages and counting. The BHL portal can be searched by several access points including title, author, subject, and scientific name. But, what is largely hidden and entirely unsearchable are the millions of natural history illustrations found with the BHL books and journals. These visual resources which include drawings, paintings, photographs, maps and diagrams represent work by some of the finest botanical and zoological illustrators in the world, including the likes of John James Audubon, Georg Dionysus Ehret, and Pierre Redouté.

Many of the illustrations are the first recorded descriptions of much of the world’s biota, providing the scientific foundation for contemporary taxonomic research and conservation assessments. Some of them are the only verifiable resource about an organism and their existence on Earth due to changes in global climate patterns and rapid loss of natural habitat for many species. Audiences for these illustrations also cross a variety of disciplines and include: biologists, artists, historians, illustrators, graphic designers, archivists, educators, students, and citizen scientists.

In 2012, the Missouri Botanical Garden was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support a project called The Art of Life: Data Mining and Crowdsourcing the Identification and Description of Natural History Illustrations from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). This talk will discuss the Art of Life objectives and current status. It will go into detail about the algorithms and schema designed for finding which pages contain illustrations and describing the subsequent output. Finally the talk will discuss the project’s benefits for the scientific community such as improving access to a significant collection of public domain images related to biodiversity.

Jiri Frank (National Museum, Prague/BHL Europe)
Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe – past, present and future
Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe project had a clear vision and mission – mobilise and preserve digital European biodiversity heritage literature and facilitate the open access to this literature through a multilingual community portal, the Biodiversity Library Exhibition (BLE) and Europeana portal. During the project BHL Europe developed the multifunctional portal, an ingest system, additional services using name services as CoL, PESI and VIAF, a unique metadata format “Open Literature Exchange Format (OLEF)” — able to handle bibliographic data (MODS), policy expressions IPR (ODRL), still image data (MIX) and scientific names (DwC Taxon Terms), and also BLE. The project officially ended in June 2012, but the vision and mission still continue. At the completion of the funding, several institutions from Czech Republic, Germany, Austria, United Kingdom, and Belgium continued to advance the BHLE technical maintenance and the content flow. Content ingest started just before the project end and is continuing. The BHLE portal currently has about 20,000 items representing about 1.8 million pages; new content is added daily via the ingest system. BHL Europe still has more than 70,000 items in the pipeline ready to be processed and in March 2015 will start to ingest whole BHL content. There are several requests from new content providers and also continue with dissemination together with the Global BHL family via social media channels. BHLE is no longer a project but a product and service supported by the afore mentioned consortium which represents the European node in Global BHL. BHL Europe is now in process of negotiations to become a part of the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) to help mobilise even more European content, partners and possible funding. The future is always a challenge, but BHLE group will do their best to be part of it.

Lucy Waruingi (African Conservation Center / BHL Africa)
Discovering African biodiversity literature collections 
On Monday, 15 April 2013, BHL-Africa was born! The launch ceremony was hosted by SANBI at the Pretoria National Botanical Garden. It began with a welcome by Dr. Tanya Abrahamse, SANBI CEO, after which she and Nancy Gwinn (Chair of the BHL Executive Committee) signed the BHL-Africa MOU (Memorandum of Understanding). Nancy Gwinn then gave a presentation detailing the history of BHL’s development, and Anne-Lise Fourie, Assistant Director for SANBI libraries, gave an overview of the BHL-Africa vision, mission, and benefits.

BHL-Africa aims to provide open access to the valuable information held in Africa’s biodiversity institutions. Towards this end, the global BHL family works with the international taxonomic community, rights holders, and other interested parties to ensure that this biodiversity heritage is made available to a global audience through open access principles. Across the continent people are embracing mobile technology as communication infrastructure expands and the uptake for these digitized resources is expanding, thus consideration to adapt mobile technology within the BHL consortium will be key in Africa.

Quote: This is of great value to Africa, as we are a continent of long-distance learning.” Anne-Lise Fourie

William Ulate (Missouri Botanical Garden / BHL)
Expanding the Biodiversity Heritage Library 
BHL has been continuously expanding in terms of quantity and types of content, geographical coverage and services provided, answering requests from diverse communities, including scientists, and particularly taxonomists. BHL currently includes more than 41 million pages, 118,000 volumes, almost 63,000 titles and since March of this year, almost 95,000 articles from BioStor and the number of taxonomic names occurrences within the text has increased substantially with the new services from the Global Names Architecture, totaling now more than 150 million appearances of names. The incorporation of segments has brought the challenge of deduplicating new article titles contributed by our providers. Solving this task by clustering segments together has allowed us to categorize these relations opening the door to new functionality for our everyday end users. Technically, there are paths that could be followed if enough resources were available, like assigning unique identifiers to legacy articles; tagging and extracting entities from the text. The wish list goes on, including citation services, segments linking out to other repositories, crowdsourcing OCR improvements and transcription, legacy articles DOIs, tagging and extracting identities, among other cool things.

Connie Rinaldo (Harvard, Museum of Comparative Zoology / BHL)
Please phrase your question in the form of feedback…
In 2009/2010, the Biodiversity Heritage Library and BHL-Europe requested user feedback with a targeted and fairly complex user survey. Changes to the BHL interface and features were made based on the results of these surveys. Since 2011, BHL staff have interviewed 32 users and published these interviews on the BHL blog. Who has been interviewed? What do they like and what would they like to see change? What issues have been addressed by interface and backend changes? Are there common themes presented by the users and have these themes changed since 2009? I will summarize and sort user comments. Feedback is always welcome through the feedback link  at BHL. What should we be aiming for next? We are asking you for your thoughts now and would welcome ideas on other ways gather your suggestions. One potentially new direction is to move from being a trusted, bounded resource to a comprehensive resource providing external links to other biodiversity information providers and external links to citations with no full text. Please phrase your question in the form of feedback….

We had a very good 3rd ICADLA meeting in Ifrane, Morocco. As part of the Advisory Committee, I was very pleased with the over all program (though disappointed that there was so much confusion in having a representative from the Google Cultural Institute and then the person ended up not attending).

The opening keynote, by Misako Ito (UNESCO Office for Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania and Tunisia) provided a good kick off to the meeting.

Next up was a special panel presentation by members of the Global Biodiversity Heritage Library community. I moderated the panel and the presenters included Nancy Gwinn (Smithsonian Libraries/BHL), Ely Wallis (Museum Victoria/BHL Australia), Anne-Lise Fourie (SANBI/BHL Africa), Magdy Nagi (Bib. Alex/BHL Egypt), Jiri Frank (National Museum, Prague/BHL Europe), and William Ulate (Missouri Botanical Garden/BHL).

Here’s the abstract for the panel:

Creating a Global Biodiversity Heritage Library

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), originally formed in 2006 with twelve U.S. and U.K. museum and botanical garden libraries, has grown to incorporate regionally-based global nodes in Europe, Australia, South America, Egypt, China, and most recently Africa. BHL now globally aggregates nearly 40 million pages of biodiversity literature representing over 110,000 volumes. Including both pre-Linnean (i.e. 1753) and contemporary volumes, the BHL allows life-science researchers to find important references to the planet’s biodiversity. Created to provide open and free access to the published literature of biodiversity, the BHL serves as a model for a large-scale curated digital library collection. Coordinating content selection, digitization, and post-digitization service to a world-wide audience. Recent projects have started to identify illustrations that have a user-base beyond the core-science community of BHL to a wider audience of school children and life-long learners. Topics to be discussed in this panel include strategies for creating and maintaining a multinational digital library program; digitization platforms and services; creating value-added features for discipline-specific digital libraries; use of social media and outreach to increase use and build new audiences; and migration of projects to sustainable programs. This session will include participation from BHL global partners from Africa, Egypt, the United States, and Australia. A one hour time slot would be preferable for this session. Presenter from the BHL Africa project will be finalized shortly.

Here’s my presentation (thanks to Bianca Crowley for suggesting that title). [others are planned to be added]

The first day was then filled with breakout sessions on the topics of “Policy and Skills Development,” “National and Collaborative Projects”, and “Institutional Experiences”. The day concluded with a gala dinner and local Berber music and dancing at the Al Akhawayne University Faculty Club.

Day two began with an excellent presentation by Driss Khrouz, Director of the National Library of the Kingdom of Morocco. Mr. Khrouz covered the development of the Moroccan Digital Library, particularly in relation to manuscripts. He also discussed relations between Morocco and other national libraries as well as issues around theft and black market sales of Moroccan manuscripts. Mr. Khrouz is a passionate advocate for libraries and made a passionate plea for increasing library services in Morocco to promote overall literacy. Too many children do not have a place to read and too many universities are not devoting resources to libraries.

I then participated in the panel discussion on “A Roadmap for Digitization in Africa”. The topics generated out of that panel (and the roadmap document) fed three breakout sessions that discussed the topics in more depth and which were then presented in a plenary reporting session.

The meeting ended with a final statement by Felix Ubogu and Abraham Azubuike, representing the ICADLA Standing Committee.

Thank you to Felix Ubogu, Michelle Pickover and Gabriele (Wits) and the rest of the ICADLA steering committee. And also a special thanks to our hosts at the Al Akhawayn University Library for wonderful local logistics: Abdelhamid Lotfi, Hanane Karkour, and the other staff of the library.

BHL-Africa logo at Pretoria National Botanical Garden

On April 15, 2013, BHL-Africa officially launched. BHL-Africa’s mission is to provide open access to the valuable biodiversity literature found within African libraries and institutions. The African consortium is hard at work identifying partners throughout the continent to sign an MOU and commit to working towards this noble objective.

The three-day BHL-Africa launch and workshop was hosted by the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) at the Pretoria National Botanical Garden in Pretoria, South Africa, from April 15-17, 2013. The meetings occurred simultaneously with the GBIF meetings also held at the botanical garden last week. Over two dozen representatives from institutions that have either signed or intend to sign the BHL-Africa MOU were present. Additionally, six colleagues from the BHL-US/UK program node were invited to attend: Nancy Gwinn (Director, Smithsonian Libraries, BHL Executive Committee Chair); Constance Rinaldo (Director, MCZ-Harvard Library, BHL Executive Committee Vice-Chair); Doug Holland (Director, Missouri Botanical Garden Library); William Ulate (Missouri Botanical Garden, BHL Technical Director); Bianca Crowley (Smithsonian Libraries, BHL Collections Coordinator); and Grace Costantino (Smithsonian Libraries, BHL Program Manager).

Monday, April 15, began with a launch ceremony, detailed in our blog post last week, during which the BHL MOU with SANBI was signed by Dr. Nancy Gwinn and Dr. Tanya Abrahamse (SANBI CEO). The real work began after the launch, with the start of the BHL-Africa workshop.

Dr. Nancy Gwinn and Dr. Tanya Abrahamse sign the BHL-Africa MOU

Day one of the workshop (Monday, April 15, afternoon) was devoted to addressing final MOU questions and outlining participants’ expectations for the meeting. Key expectations and areas in need of discussion included: Clarifying BHL’s open access policy and its implications for African participants; a concise description of the value of BHL for participating institutions in order to secure managerial buy-in; organization of clear fundraising strategies; the need for extensive training; identification of available resources and digitization capacity building; and the best way to collaborate and share resources amongst participating members. Overall meeting expectations were to elect a BHL-Africa Steering Committee and establish an outline for a two-year work plan.

The BHL-Africa Group Photo!

Much of day two (Tuesday, April 16) was spent investigating workflow and organizational questions, including collections development, copyright, communication, and infrastructure. The primary reason for the presence of the BHL-US/UK team was to offer our African colleagues the expertise we have gained in these areas over the past six years, as well as to help define global expectations for our new members.

Towards this end, Nancy Gwinn began by identifying four main expectations for BHL-Africa: Content Creation; Audience Building; Content Identification; and Partnership Building. In short, these expectations translate to not only growing the BHL corpus by digitizing African collections, but also helping BHL identify content to scan, both within and outside of Africa. Furthermore, BHL Africa must work to both build the BHL audience by promoting the project throughout the continent, but also expand the BHL consortium by identifying institutions that can contribute to the initiative.

Constance Rinaldo then gave a presentation on copyright, defining public domain, open access, and the Creative Commons licenses employed by BHL-US/UK. She was quick to stress, however, that each BHL node and institution must follow the copyright laws of their own countries, and, as BHL is not a legal entity, it is ultimately each scanning institution that is legally responsible for the content they contribute to the collection.

Bianca Crowley on BHL Collections Development

Bianca Crowley then gave our African colleagues some insight into the BHL-US/UK collection development process, outlining our selection and de-duplication process, digitization principles, metadata requirements, and content integration. Communication and collaboration methods were a key point of discussion, as they are critical for successful collections development.

Grace Costantino followed with a presentation on BHL-US/UK’s use of social media, which allows us to communicate project developments, provide context to the books in our collection, reach new audiences on new platforms, and uncover hidden gems in our collection. Following the presentation, an open discussion about each institution’s current use of social media, social media in the context of Africa, and how BHL-Africa might use social media occurred.

Finally, William Ulate detailed the BHL infrastructure, demoing the Macaw tool developed by Joel Richard at the Smithsonian Libraries, which is used to ingest books through Internet Archive into BHL. A remote installation of Macaw is running at the University of Pretoria and can be accessed via the web by any BHL-Africa participant to load digitized content into BHL.

BHL-African participants were also given a chance, on day two, to break out into two working groups, dedicated to Collections Development/Copyright and Outreach/Communication. These sessions allowed participants to apply the information given during the presentations to the realities of the BHL-Africa project.

The final day of the meeting (Wednesday, April 17) was spent identifying preliminary tasks for a two-year BHL-Africa workplan and electing a BHL-Africa Steering Committee. Workplan components include establishing a list of titles that each institution wishes to contribute to BHL; drafting documentation, based largely on existing files from gBHL, for workflow and collaboration guidance; and drafting a preliminary communication and outreach plan, which addresses not only external, but also internal, communication needs.

BHL-Africa Steering Committee (Left to Right): Lawrence Monda (Technical Advisor), Ashah Owano, Loi Namugenyi, Anne-Lise Fourie, Ria Groenewald

The BHL-Africa Steering Committee was also elected at the meeting. BHL-Africa has been divided into three regional nodes: North/Central; Eastern; Southern. Each regional node elects two representatives for the Steering Committee. Currently, there is no representation in North/Central Africa within the project, so only four members (two from Southern, two from Eastern) were elected at the meeting. Elected members include: Anne-Lise Fourie (SANBI, Southern); Ria Groenewald (University of Pretoria, Southern); Ashah Owano (National Museums of Kenya, Eastern); and Loi Namugenyi (Uganda National Council for Science and Technology, Eastern). Lawrence Monda (National Museums of Kenya) was elected as the BHL-Africa Technical Representative. Two additional members will be elected as North/Central institutions are added to the BHL fold. The Steering Committee will be responsible for providing strategic guidance, developing fundraising plans and approving budgets, and organizing pan-continental efforts.

The three-day BHL-Africa launch and workshop was an extremely successful event which resulted in the creation of an actionable plan for project development and the identification of notably capable leadership. Meeting attendees left feeling energized, with a clear sense of purpose. Just one and a half years ago, at the Life and Literature conference, the concept of BHL-Africa was born. Today, it is a reality. We congratulate our colleagues on the astounding progress they have made and look forward to seeing great things from BHL-Africa!

William Ulate and I attended the Global Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) Content Summit at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s facility on Barro Colorado Island (BCI) in Panama. The meetings, 17-19 January 2012, brought together a group of current and planned world-wide EOL content providers. Joining BHL at the meeting were representatives from the Atlas of Living Australia, Naturalis, INBio, CONABIO, NHM/ViBRANT, GBIF, French Institute of Pondicherry India, Alexander von Humboldt Biological Resources Research Institute, Biological Diversity and Environment Information System (Peru), and Smithsonian Institution Global Earth Observatory (SI GEO).

After taking a bus from Panama City to Gamboa, we boarded one of the Smithsonian boats, The Morpho, for the 90 minute trip to Barro Colorado Island. After a quick orientation to the facilities on the island, we were assigned to our dorm rooms at the field station. In keeping with the BHL camaraderie, William and I shared room (along with a fairly large spider that we gave plenty of space).

The group reassembled for a hike around BCI. We were provided with excellent guides and spent nearly 3 hours exploring. Though we didn’t see some of the more charismatic megafauna of the island (Tapir, Ocelot), we were showered with attention by a troop of Howler Monkeys, spotted an Agouti, heard the calls of two species of Toucan, saw a large piliated woodpecker, many ants (including Army ants and some impressive leaf cutters). Here’s an EOL Collection of some of the things we saw.

As it got darker, a Tinamou posed for some photos and White Faced monkeys appeared. Oh, and there were some giant spiders. After a quick dinner in the dinning hall, we started in on the meeting. Each project represented gave a brief presentation to help the participants understand its focus. You can find mine here and William’s here. The others will be posted by the EOL staff.

The first full day of meetings included an overview of the EOL activities and training on the content provider tools. In the evening, we had a social gathering on one of the verandahs where we watched some nocturnal creatures (bats, a large toad, etc.).

The final day of meetings (January 19) focused on developing content plans from the different partners as well as a discussion of EOL v.3 led by Erick Mata (EOL Executive Director).

We made some very good new contacts with our colleagues in India, Costa Rica, Peru, Colombia, and Mexico and explored new collaborations with our partners in Europe and Australia.

Early on the morning of 20 January, we boarded the boat back to Gamboa and back to our next destinations.