This quarter, the Biodiversity Heritage Library was pleased to welcome The Arboretum Library at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden as its newest Affiliate. The BHL consortium, which has grown substantially over the past year, now consists of 17 Members and 16 Affiliates.

The Arboretum Library holds an extensive collection of books, magazines, government documents, pamphlets, and audio-visual materials covering a wide range of topics, including gardening and garden design, plant lore, medical botany, botanical art, ethnobotany, California native plant life, and Mediterranean-climate botany.

Twenty-four magazine titles published by the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden are already available through BHL as a result of The Arboretum Library Good Family Foundation Digitization Project, a collaboration between the Arboretum, BHL, and the Missouri Botanical Garden. The publications, dating back to the 1950s, include information about the institution’s history, Los Angeles area horticulture, and research conducted by Arboretum staff. The articles have been indexed for author, title, date, and subjects (including people and plant names), all of which are searchable.

The articles in the Arboretum publications have both a scientific and popular appeal. For example, among the many interesting topics covered is the history of coffee, which Leonid Enari explores in the June 1976 issue of Lasca Leaves.

According to the article, coffee was used as food at least by 800 AD, but the “habit of coffee drinking seems to have started in Arabia in the 15th century” (Enari 1976). The first beverages created from the berries of the coffee plant were likely alcoholic, made from the pulp of the berries. It is unknown when the practice of roasting the seeds (beans) and using them to prepare today’s familiar coffee beverage was discovered, but its consumption in Europe was popularized through coffeehouses that were often regarded, particularly in England, by the church and state as “centers of political agitation.”

Leaves and berries of Coffea arabica. Enari, Leonid. “Coffee.” Lasca Leaves. v. 26 (1976). http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/41846781. Digitized by the Missouri Botanical Garden. CC-BY-NC-SA.

The Arabian coffee tree (Coffea arabica) is used for the majority of the world’s commercial coffee production. The all-important coffee beans are the seeds of the coffee plant (found inside the plant’s fruit) which have been dried and roasted. After being roasted and ground, coffee will lose most of its aroma and flavor within 10 days. You can learn more about the history of coffee and its commercial production in the Lasca Leaves article.

The existing and future contributions from the Arboretum Library will provide valuable access to information about the history of botany and horticulture, botany in Southern California, and the Arboretum’s impact on these research areas. We look forward to working with our newest Affiliate to enhance BHL’s collections and expand our service to the global botanical, horticultural, and wider research communities.

AVAILABLE PROJECTS:

Content Analysis. 
This project will be an analysis of the quantity of literature underpinning the field of biodiversity, the amount of that literature in the public domain, the representation of each discipline (delineated by taxon group) within BHL, an exploration of methodologies to scope the collections, and areas where BHL may target development to better serve the research population. Host: BHL Chicago partners (The Field Museum of Natural History and the Chicago Botanic Garden) with mentors Library Directors Christine Giannoni and Leora Siegel.

Import of Crowdsourced Data Corrections and Enhancements. 
Building on the IMLS grant received by the Missouri Botanical Garden, Purposeful Gaming and BHL, in which BHL worked with Mary Flannagan and Tiltfactor , the mentors for this project will work with the resident to develop methodologies and propose tools for integration of crowdsourced data corrections and enhancements back into the BHL portal. Best practices will be documented for verification, trust, and multi-tier review. Host: Harvard University: MCZ, mentors Library Managers Constance Rinaldo and Joseph deVeer.

Enabling image discovery within the Biodiversity Heritage Library. 
Building on the successful NEH Art of Life grant, crowdsourced metadata around BHL images hosted on Flickr and Zooniverse would be integrated back into the BHL through user interface modifications to the BHL portal to enable image searching, browsing and display. The resident will work with the BHL technical team to propose best practices for integration of this data into BHL as well as sustainable methodologies for augmenting image tagging for BHL content. Host: Missouri Botanical Garden (MOBOT), mentors Library Director Douglas Holland and Data Projects Coordinator, Trish Rose-Sandler.

Digital Library Best Practices Analysis. 
The mentor will work with the resident to consult with BHL partners such as DPLA and Europeana to determine how BHL data works in these large scale national and pan-national digital libraries. The resident will propose analyses of other large-scale digital libraries (HathiTrust, the Internet Archive, National Digital Library of New Zealand, Trove, for example) to categorize high value tools and services that can be built into the next version of BHL or developed with existing APIs from partners. Host: Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, mentor Chief Librarian and Curator Richard Hulser. NHM Research Library.

User Needs and Usability Analysis. 
The mentor will work with the resident to identify members of the larger taxonomic and biodiversity informatics community to determine user needs and services for providing increased value to BHL content. Building on a ten year relationship with this community, BHL staff will introduce the resident to relevant initiatives hosted at the Smithsonian, such as Consortium for the Barcode of Life (CBoL) and Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) and to partners such as Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). The resident will analyze input gathered to define recommendations and requirements for expanding the BHL digital library functionality. Host: BHL Secretariat/Smithsonian Libraries, mentor Carolyn Sheffield, BHL Program Manager.