Just past the halfway point of its 2-year IMLS grant period, the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL) project has made significant contributions to BHL’s collections and is well on its way to achieving its stated goals: securing permission for 50 in-copyright titles; adding 100 new contributors; adding 300,000 metadata records; and positioning BHL as an on-ramp for content delivered to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

The institutions participating in EABL

Background

EABL was conceived to address some of the persistent challenges facing digital repositories in the U.S. scientific community. How do small organizations get involved when they don’t have much content to contribute? How can the necessary metadata be harvested or created to point to their content? And how can the discoverability of that content be improved?

By reaching out to small natural history organizations outside the BHL consortium, EABL has created a pathway for inclusion in BHL, and, ultimately, the U.S. national digital infrastructure (DPLA). The first step is getting content into BHL.

Process

Diagram illustrating the relationship between IA and BHL

When an institution has already digitized its content, EABL Metadata Specialist Mariah Lewis, at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG), uploads it to Internet Archive (IA). Because BHL strives to create cover-to-cover digital reproductions of the printed item, this sometimes requires stitching together article PDFs prior to upload. It also requires a MARCXML record, which Mariah pulls from an existing catalog record or, in rare cases, creates from scratch. Once in IA, the content is ingested into the BHL EABL collection, where Mariah curates it to ensure that it displays correct enumeration and metadata. Recently, the EABL team worked with BHL to add a “Rights Holder” field, which distinguishes the organization that owns the copyright for a publication from the “Contributor,” or the organizations that provided the physical copy.

For organizations with material that hasn’t yet been digitized, EABL provides funds for shipping and scanning the material at an IA scanning center. In special cases where the material is too fragile or valuable to ship to IA, EABL is working with third-party scanners or training personnel to do their own in-house scanning. Alternatively, EABL secures permission for a title from the rights holder and then a BHL member library pulls a copy from the shelf and scans it.

Material that is uploaded to BHL will eventually appear in DPLA as well. DPLA is currently mapping its fields to BHL to facilitate this content transfer and will have records ready for review early in the new year. When this process is complete, BHL will be an active “content hub,” aggregating content from smaller providers and feeding it to DPLA.

For organizations that plan to contribute material to BHL over time, especially those that are interested in becoming BHL Affiliates, Mariah provides training on all aspects of the BHL digitization workflow. She does this in person or virtually, depending on the organization’s needs, and has also created video tutorials of the metadata creation and upload process.

Results

So far, EABL has secured permission for 106 in-copyright titles and added 59 new contributors to BHL. The EABL collection holds 3,428 volumes from 289 titles, containing 377,924 pages. Important titles (some of which have not yet been scanned) include:

• Zoologica: Scientific Contributions of the New York Zoological Society
• Roosevelt Wild Life Bulletin and Roosevelt Wild Life Annals
• Entomologica Americana
• Wilson Journal of Ornithology
• Journal of Arachnology
• North American Birds
• Kirtlandia
• Journal of the New York Entomological Society
• Journal of Raptor Research
• Memoirs of the Southern California Academy of Sciences
• Arnoldia
• The Green Scene
• Transactions of the Worcester County Horticultural Society

An important part of curating these titles, and one that greatly enhances their discoverability, is article and chapter definition. EABL team members Susan Lynch at NYBG and Trish Rose-Sandler at Missouri Botanical Garden (MOBOT) are working to index journals added to BHL through EABL. This involves collecting available citations from the publisher or from databases like Web of Science so that article titles and authors’ names can be isolated. To date, EABL has indexed 58,801 articles and chapters in BHL. The value of this becomes apparent when browsing long-running publications like Zoologica or Kirtlandia, which are now 100% indexed. (For more information about how to view articles, see last month’s blog post about Kirtlandia).

In-copyright titles added by BHL

For more information about EABL, please visit the wiki, where you will find an up-to-date list of digitized titles, a list of presentations given about the project, related blog posts, and the EABL Twitter feed.

Get Involved

EABL will receive new content through the fall of 2017. If you know of a publication or institution that you would like to see represented in BHL and DPLA, please contact EABL Community Manager Patrick Randall at [email protected] or Principal Investigator Susan Fraser at [email protected]. If you would like funding for digitization, please fill out the EABL interest survey.

Origins of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History

The story of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History (CMNH) begins in the1830s, when a small group of men filled a two-room wooden building in Public Square, downtown Cleveland, with mounted animals. This building was known as the “Ark,” and the men who gathered there, united in their passion for natural history, were called “Arkites.”

The Arkites were led by William Case, who would later become mayor of Cleveland. He, his brother, and his father had used the Ark as a place to retreat from work, and in the absence of any other museums in the city, it became a hub for all kinds of collection and research.

Case Hall, engraving by William Payne, courtesy of Special Collections, Cleveland State University Library

In 1876, the Ark was relocated to Case Hall. It shared the space with other organizations, including the Kirtland Society (formerly the Cleveland Academy of Natural Sciences), named after renowned naturalist and fellow Arkite Jared Potter Kirtland, who died the following year. Case Hall remained the home of the Ark until 1916, when it was demolished to make way for the U.S. Post Office, Court House, and Custom House.

Kirtland’s Warbler, namesake of Jared Potter Kirtland, from C.J. Maynard’s The Birds of Eastern North America, 1896, Plate XXI. Digitized by Smithsonian Libraries.

The collections of both the Ark and the Kirtland Society found a new home in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, founded in 1920. CMNH relocated several times as its collections grew, settling eventually at Wade Park, where it is today. William Case’s bird collection can still be viewed there, as well as many of the specimens provided by the Kirtland Society. Other exhibits include Balto, the hero dog of Nome, Alaska; “Dunk,” a large specimen of Dunkleosteus terrelli; and, most famous of all, “Lucy,” discovered in 1974 by former CMNH curator Donald Johanson.

The collections and physical space of the museum continue to grow today; this spring, CMNH unveiled the Ralph Perkins II Wildlife Center & Woods Garden, where visitors can view Ohio flora and fauna in their native habitat.

Kirtlandia

In 1972, CMNH began publishing Kirtlandia, a journal of original, peer-reviewed research by Museum staff. Wendy Wasman, Librarian and Archivist of the Harold T. Clark Library at CMNH, notes that Kirtlandia has a “long history of publishing cutting edge research in the natural sciences…Over the years, there have been articles on dinosaurs, fossil sharks, archaeology, botany, herpetology, mussels, moths, and even an entire issue devoted to paleontological research of the Kenya Rift Valley.”

Partial skeleton of “Lucy,”from Johanson, et al., “A New Species of the Genus Australopithecus…“, Kirtlandia, no. 28, 1978. Digitized by Smithsonian Libraries.

Early on, Kirtlandia issues focused on a single topic. In the late 1970s, however, issues began to contain multiple articles, and the length of those articles increased. They also featured more photographs and diagrams, though they retained their simple, sparse design.

Kirtlandia is supported by the Kirtlandia Society, founded in 1976 to advance research and education at the museum. Wasman says that because the CMNH library (named the Harold Terry Clark Library in 1972) had an active publications exchange program from the beginning, Kirtlandia can now be found in over 200 university and museum libraries worldwide, and that while publication is currently in hiatus, BHL has given it an even wider reach.

Kirtlandia was digitized by the Smithsonian Libraries as a part of the IMLS-funded Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL) project. Susan Lynch, an EABL team member at the New York Botanical Garden, worked with Rod Page and BioStor, using metadata provided by Wendy Wasman, to define all of the articles in Kirtlandia. This allows users to search for and navigate to individual articles in the journal without having to scroll through an entire volume or set of volumes.

In search results, Kirtlandia articles can be found under the Articles/Chapters/Treatments tab:

When browsing from the title page, articles can be found by clicking View Identified Parts:

This is the first in a monthly series of posts highlighting contributions to the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL) project, which aims to enhance BHL’s collections with content from natural history libraries, societies, and other institutions across the United States.

The Roosevelt Wild Life Station (RWLS) is a research center within the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) in Syracuse, New York. Its mission is “to deliver the science and trained professionals to preserve our wildlife heritage and save imperiled species worldwide.” In the first half of the 20th century, the RWLS produced two publications—the Roosevelt Wild Life Bulletin and the Roosevelt Wild Life Annals—which are now available in BHL.

“The New York State College of Forestry, Syracuse, containing the offices and laboratories of the Roosevelt Wild Life Forest Experiment Station,” from Roosevelt Wild Life Bulletin, v.1 no.1 (1921).

Founding of the RWLS

In December of 1916 Charles Christopher Adams, a zoologist at the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, approached Theodore Roosevelt to discuss the need for systematic study of big game and other mammals in the forests of North America. Dr. Adams believed that a lack of understanding of these animals was a problem not only for scientists, but also for industry—particularly forestry—and the economy in general. Roosevelt agreed that research in this area should be undertaken and asked Dr. Adams to devise a plan, which he outlined the following year. Despite Roosevelt’s enthusiastic approval, the work was delayed—first by the onset of World War I, and then by Roosevelt’s death on January 9, 1919.

Dr. Adams, undeterred by these events, saw a new opportunity to carry on the vision he had shared with Roosevelt, and convinced the state legislature of New York to establish the Roosevelt Wild Life Forest Experiment Station as a memorial to the former President. The Station was signed into law on May 10, 1919, as part of the New York State College of Forestry. The legislation stated that the RWLS would conduct “investigations, experiments, and research in relation to the habits, life histories, methods of propagation and management of fish, birds, game and food and fur-bearing animals and forest wild life.” Dr. Adams was the Station’s first director.

“The field party of the Roosevelt Wild Life Station at camp on Mount Marcy, working in cooperation with other scientists,” from Roosevelt Wild Life Bulletin, v.1 no.1 (1921).

Writing in Science in June, 1919, Dr. Adams proclaimed:

“Never before in America, and for that matter, possibly, never before in the world, has there been a forest biological station devoted primarily or exclusively to the study of every phase of forest wild life. The establishment of such a station at the New York State College of Forestry, at Syracuse University, is thus an event of considerable general interest and importance, not only to those interested in the conservation of wild life, to foresters, and to zoologists in general, and particularly to field naturalists, but in addition to many others who are interested in the ecology of fish, birds, game, fur-bearing animals, and other kinds of forest wild life. This station, named in honor of the man … thus becomes a very appropriate memorial to Theodore Roosevelt.”

An editorial in the August, 1919 issue of Forest and Stream speculated that “The work that such an experiment station may do is almost limitless and its possibilities are as yet quite beyond the range of our imagination.”

The conservationist George Bird Grinnell was equally laudatory; in the foreword to the first issue of the Roosevelt Wild Life Bulletin (1921), he wrote, “No one more than Theodore Roosevelt appreciated the value of the work done and to be done by the field-naturalist. No one more than he would welcome those services to science that may be accomplished by the Experiment Station that bears his name.”

“The fish laboratory of the Roosevelt Wild Life Station,” from Roosevelt Wild Life Bulletin, v.1 no.1 (1921).

Publications of the RWLS

Under Dr. Adams’s tenure as director, the RWLS began publishing the Roosevelt Wild Life Bulletin in 1921, which ran until 1950. The Bulletin contains general and “popular interest” pieces related to forest ecology. Many of these articles describe the geography and wildlife of the forests immediately surrounding the RWLS, as well as the Adirondacks and other regions of upstate New York. Several others detail field research conducted at Camp Roosevelt, Yellowstone National Park, where Professor Alvin Whitney, of the New York State College of Forestry, ran a boys’ summer camp in the early 1920s.

Color plates from Roosevelt Wild Life Annals, v.1 no.3-4 (1926)

Typically, each issue of the Bulletin is organized around a single topic or group of related topics: parasites in freshwater fishes, a county-level wildlife and forest survey, and the management of ruffed grouse, among others. These articles, which treated wildlife as natural resources, would surely have interested naturalists, foresters, and hunters alike. In fact, within a few years of the RWLS’s founding, people from as far away as India began to request research on subjects as esoteric as muskrat farming.

“Field party of the Roosevelt Wild Life Station in Yellowstone Park, summer of 1921,” in Roosevelt Wild Life Bulletin, v.1 no.1 (1921).

In 1926, the RWLS began a second publication, the Roosevelt Wild Life Annals, which ran for 10 years. Whereas the Bulletin was intended for a broad audience, the Annals contain technical papers that would have been of interest to professional naturalists, particularly zoologists and botanists. Like the Bulletin, each issue is typically devoted to a single topic: the red squirrel, trout streams in Yellowstone National Park, the bank swallow, and others.

The RWLS Today

From Roosevelt Wild Life Bulletin, v.1 no.1 (1921)

Following the publication of the last Bulletin in 1950, the RWLS entered a period of inactivity that lasted until 1999, when it was reactivated through a combination of private and state funding. Governor George Pataki and Theodore Roosevelt IV presided over the rededication. The RWLS began to support student internships at ESF’s Adirondack Ecological Center, and in 2014 the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation provided $3.4 million in funding for wildlife research and management.

Today, the RWLS focuses on the northeastern U.S. and southeastern Canada in the context of truly global issues: habitat loss and climate change. In addition to providing hands-on experience to students of wildlife science, its priorities are “protection of imperiled keystone and strongly valued species vulnerable to the impacts of rapidly changing landscapes and climate; and habitat management issues, such as maintaining effective habitat in private-land mosaics, protecting and expanding core habitat areas, and securing habitat connectivity.” In these efforts, the RWLS carries on the vision shared by Dr. Adams and Theodore Roosevelt a hundred years ago.

Reference

Adams, C. C. (1919). The Roosevelt Wild-Life Forest Experiment Station. Science, n.s. 49(1275), 533-534.

Frair, J., & Gibbs, J. P. (2011, Spring). The Roosevelt Wild Life Station: Revitalizing a forgotten conservation legacy. Fair Chase, 30-34.

National Park Service. Roosevelt Lodge, 1920. Retrieved from https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/historyculture/rooseveltlodge.htm

SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. History of the Roosevelt Wild Life Station [PDF document]. Retrieved from http://www.esf.edu/rwls/timeline.pdf