All posts tagged with purposeful-gaming

The BHL and Encylopedia of Life (EOL) share the vision of open access to knowledge about life on earth. BHL works to achieve this goal by providing open access to biodiversity literature. EOL tackles this challenge by gathering, generating, and sharing biodiversity knowledge in an open, freely accessible digital repository. BHL and EOL have been collaborating since 2007, sharing content, best practices, and expertise. Both websites are also extensively interlinked. Taxa identified on pages in BHL are linked to the corresponding species page in EOL.

BHL and the Missouri Botanical Garden are pleased to announce a major milestone reached in the project, “Purposeful Gaming and BHL”. Dartmouth College’s Tiltfactor was chosen to design the game that will help improve access to texts from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL).

The Purposeful Gaming and BHL project is based at the Missouri Botanical Garden (MOBOT) in St Louis, Missouri. In the fall of 2013, MOBOT was awarded a $449,641 grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to test new means of using crowdsourcing and gaming to support the enhancement of texts from the BHL.

William Brewster (1851-1919) was a renowned American amateur ornithologist, first president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and a president of the American Ornithologists’ Union. He was an avid collector of birds and their nests and eggs, and collected over forty thousand specimens from 1861 until his death in 1919. His collection, bequeathed to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, is considered one of the finest private collections of North American birds ever assembled. Though Brewster collected throughout North America, his collection is especially comprehensive in its coverage of the birds of New England. Brewster thoroughly documented his collecting trips.

Two members of BHL’s Technical Advisory Group (TAG), BHL Technical Director William Ulate from Missouri Botanical Garden and Joe deVeer, Head of Technical Services of the Ernst Mayr Library at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard, “virtually” attended the CITSCribe Hackathon in Gainesville, Florida from Dec. 16 to 20, 2013.