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.

Attendees at the 2013 BHL Institutional Council Meeting. Back Row, Left to Right: Martin Kalfatovic (BHL Program Director); Marty Schlabach (Mann Library, Cornell University); Judy Warnement (Harvard University Herbarium); William Ulate (BHL Technical Director); Diane Rielinger (MBL-WHOI); Tom Baione (American Museum of Natural History). Front Row, Left to Right: Bianca Crowley (BHL Collections Coordinator); Susan Fraser (the New York Botanical Garden); Nancy Gwinn (Smithsonian Libraries); Connie Rinaldo (Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology); Grace Costantino (BHL Program Manager); Jane Smith (Natural History Museum, London).

The seventh annual BHL Institutional Council Meeting occurred at the Marine Biological Laboratory and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute Library (MBL-WHOI) in Woods Hole, MA, on May 6-7, 2013.

The BHL Institutional Council is composed of the directors (or designated alternative representatives) of the BHL member libraries. The annual meetings serve as an opportunity for council members to provide updates about BHL activities at their institutions, discuss governance issues, make funding decisions, and strategize about the future of BHL. It also allows BHL Administrative Staff to inform council members about developments in their areas of expertise.

Representatives from eight member libraries were able to attend the meeting in person, and, for the first time in IC Meeting history, those who could not be present physically were able to virtually join the meeting using video conference software available within the MBL-WHOI library. Representatives from California Academy of Science, the Field Museum Library, and our newest BHL member, The Library of Congress, participated in a virtual capacity throughout the meeting. As part of the meeting, each representative gave updates on the BHL activities that occurred at their institutions over the past year.

Hard at work at the 2013 BHL IC Meeting!

Day one of the meeting began with a BHL Program Director update, provided by Martin R. Kalfatovic, discussing project developments and achievements.

Also during day one, William Ulate, BHL Technical Director and Global Coordinator, detailed BHL’s work in the past year, highlighting the implementation of the new user interface, work to date on the Art of Life  project, and the status of BHL’s six global nodes. BHL Program Manager, Grace Costantino, also provided an update on BHL’s outreach activities, including the presentation of a new BHL Outreach and Communication plan. Finally, Bianca Crowley, BHL Collections Coordinator, outlined her recent work and that of the BHL Collection’s Committee, including an overview of collection analysis needs and a new Permissions Plans which proposes a strategy for obtaining and fulfilling agreements with publishers to scan in-copyright content for BHL.

The BHL Business Meeting occurred on day two. Topics covered included approval of the 2013 budget, discussion of a new proposed member library organizational structure for BHL, and brainstorming about fundraising options to achieve financial sustainability. One final topic of discussion was a review of a proposed revision to BHL’s vision and mission statements:

Vision

“Inspiring discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge.”

Mission

“The Biodiversity Heritage Library works collaboratively to make biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community.”

As always, these meetings serve as a valuable opportunity to bring together BHL’s geographically dispersed leadership in order to make important decisions about BHL’s future. The decisions reached at this meeting promise to ensure continued positive growth and prosperity. We look forward to the ninth annual meeting next spring.

See presentations from the meetings by:

• Martin Kalfatovic, BHL Program Director: Presentation
• Grace Costantino, BHL Program Manager: Presentation One | Presentation Two
• Bianca Crowley, BHL Collections Coordinator: Presentation One | Presentation Two

* Photo Credits: Martin Kalfatovic, BHL Program Director

Robert Miller at the Internet Archive San Francisco

These days with digital cameras built into your phone, most everyone has some first hand experience creating digital images. Creating the nearly 40 million page images on BHL is in many ways similar what you probably do on a daily basis with your phone – it’s really just a matter of scale in terms of the technology used for the digitization and the special care taken with the books.

The most important part of the process, however, are the people behind the cameras that take the pictures. Today we want to focus on a key group of those people. As many know, the Internet Archive is a not-for-profit founded by Internet pioneer Brewster Kahle and based in San Francisco. Since 2007, the Internet Archive has been the primary digitization partner of the BHL. The Internet Archive has facilities around the world. Those that the BHL has used include:

Large scanning facilities (with multiple “Scribe” scanning machines) in:

• San Francisco (Internet Archive)
• Washington, DC (Library of Congress/FedScan)
• Northern New Jersey
• Boston (Boston Public Library)

Smaller facilities in:

• Ft. Wayne, Indiana
• University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

And “satellites”, single Scribe machines, in:

• Natural History Museum, London
• Smithsonian Libraries, Washington, DC

Managing these (and a number more around the world) is the Internet Archive’s Director for Books, Robert Miller. Assisting Robert with that task are the team of scanning center coordinators that manage the workflow and keep our materials safe while putting them online for our worldwide user community.

Pictured below are seven scanning center coordinators gathered for the Internet Archive’s Leaders’ Forum (at the Richmond Branch, SFPL), 24-25 November 2012 (from left):

• Jude Coelho (Open Library)
• Shelia De Roche (FedScan)
• Gemma Waterston (satelites)
• Stacy Argondizzo (Princeton, NJ)
• Jeff Sharpe (ACPL Fort Wayne, IN)
• Stacey A. Seronick (Boston Scan Center)
• Jesse Bell (San Francisco Center)