All posts tagged with smithsonian-libraries-and-archives

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is pleased to welcome JJ Dearborn to the newly created position of BHL Data Manager. The new Data Manager position is part of the BHL Secretariat, hosted by the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives. As Data Manager, Ms. Dearborn will be responsible for the oversight and management of the digital data collections (datasets) of BHL. She will be developing and implementing a comprehensive view of how BHL collections can be optimized to support the interoperability of BHL data in the larger biodiversity community. 

In the first part of this blog series, I explained a portion of the analyses I performed during my time as an intern for the Biodiversity Heritage Library (July-August 2021). These analyses revolved around metadata patterns in BHL’s collection that highlight shortcomings in terms of diversification in the Library’s catalogue. In that post, by focusing on comparative metadata and the case of BHL México, I argued that an outreach plan that included the establishment of global partnerships between BHL and institutions in the Global South was a solid strategy to diversify the Library’s collections. This same argument is sustained by the second portion of the analyses I performed during my internship and that I present here, which deal primarily with patterns of associations and representation in the subject lists of BHL’s materials and the specific case of Central America and Panama.

The goal of the second part of my internship was thus to identify semantic patterns in subject lists that highlight the diversification—or lack thereof—in materials about Latin American biodiversity contained in BHL.