All posts tagged with imls

On February 4-5, 2016, Smithsonian Libraries hosted staff from the New York Botanical Garden, the Museum of Comparative Zoology (Harvard University), and the Missouri Botanical Garden as part of a training workshop for the New York Botanical Garden’s IMLS-funded grant, Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is hosting a 48-hour data correction event on December 7-9 2015. We’re enlisting the help of you, the BHL community, to help us complete 10,000 pages from BHL’s OCR output that we can then use as a training set to apply to the remaining BHL corpus.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is excited to announce the release of two new games by Tiltfactor that will improve access to BHL collections and open a new frontier for crowdsourcing and citizen science. Smorball and Beanstalk were designed as part of the Purposeful Gaming Project, which explores how digital games can make scanned content more accessible and searchable for cultural institutions.

At the turn of the 20th century, Boston saw a rapid increase in human settlement and industrialization which quickly transformed the once pristine Commonwealth into a highly developed, unsightly, and unhealthy metropolis. The movement to preserve what was left of Greater Boston’s natural wonders was inspired by the writings by transcendental thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who were advocates of the idea to “keep the New World new.” Local activists for the cause included Wilson Flagg, Elizur Wright, Sylvester Baxter, and Charles Eliot.