BHL Quarterly Report, Q4 FY13

If you’re reading this blog, you probably already know that BHL provides free and open access to millions of pages of biodiversity literature.  But did you also know that BHL is working to change the nature of biodiversity research through digitization?

In addition to the over 2 million pages scanned by BHL participating libraries in the past twelve months, BHL also co-launched the NESCent-EOL-BHL research sprint which will support research projects seeking answers to important biodiversity and ecological questions through mining BHL and EOL; received an IMLS National Leadership Grant for enhancing full text searching and indexing in BHL through purposeful gaming; organized a social media campaign around unsung biodiversity hero Alfred Russel Wallace; and hosted five interns to build social media, marketing, and reference skills in the next generation of librarians.

Learn all about these developments, and see how our project is performing in the latest BHL Quarterly Report and Newsletter!  Stay up to date in the future by subscribing to our quarterly newsletters.

We know you’ll be impressed at the ways we’re inspiring discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge!

BHL Fall 2013 Newsletter

BHL-Africa logo at Pretoria National Botanical Garden

On April 15, 2013, BHL-Africa officially launched. BHL-Africa’s mission is to provide open access to the valuable biodiversity literature found within African libraries and institutions. The African consortium is hard at work identifying partners throughout the continent to sign an MOU and commit to working towards this noble objective.

The three-day BHL-Africa launch and workshop was hosted by the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) at the Pretoria National Botanical Garden in Pretoria, South Africa, from April 15-17, 2013. The meetings occurred simultaneously with the GBIF meetings also held at the botanical garden last week. Over two dozen representatives from institutions that have either signed or intend to sign the BHL-Africa MOU were present. Additionally, six colleagues from the BHL-US/UK program node were invited to attend: Nancy Gwinn (Director, Smithsonian Libraries, BHL Executive Committee Chair); Constance Rinaldo (Director, MCZ-Harvard Library, BHL Executive Committee Vice-Chair); Doug Holland (Director, Missouri Botanical Garden Library); William Ulate (Missouri Botanical Garden, BHL Technical Director); Bianca Crowley (Smithsonian Libraries, BHL Collections Coordinator); and Grace Costantino (Smithsonian Libraries, BHL Program Manager).

Monday, April 15, began with a launch ceremony, detailed in our blog post last week, during which the BHL MOU with SANBI was signed by Dr. Nancy Gwinn and Dr. Tanya Abrahamse (SANBI CEO). The real work began after the launch, with the start of the BHL-Africa workshop.

Dr. Nancy Gwinn and Dr. Tanya Abrahamse sign the BHL-Africa MOU

Day one of the workshop (Monday, April 15, afternoon) was devoted to addressing final MOU questions and outlining participants’ expectations for the meeting. Key expectations and areas in need of discussion included: Clarifying BHL’s open access policy and its implications for African participants; a concise description of the value of BHL for participating institutions in order to secure managerial buy-in; organization of clear fundraising strategies; the need for extensive training; identification of available resources and digitization capacity building; and the best way to collaborate and share resources amongst participating members. Overall meeting expectations were to elect a BHL-Africa Steering Committee and establish an outline for a two-year work plan.

The BHL-Africa Group Photo!

Much of day two (Tuesday, April 16) was spent investigating workflow and organizational questions, including collections development, copyright, communication, and infrastructure. The primary reason for the presence of the BHL-US/UK team was to offer our African colleagues the expertise we have gained in these areas over the past six years, as well as to help define global expectations for our new members.

Towards this end, Nancy Gwinn began by identifying four main expectations for BHL-Africa: Content Creation; Audience Building; Content Identification; and Partnership Building. In short, these expectations translate to not only growing the BHL corpus by digitizing African collections, but also helping BHL identify content to scan, both within and outside of Africa. Furthermore, BHL Africa must work to both build the BHL audience by promoting the project throughout the continent, but also expand the BHL consortium by identifying institutions that can contribute to the initiative.

Constance Rinaldo then gave a presentation on copyright, defining public domain, open access, and the Creative Commons licenses employed by BHL-US/UK. She was quick to stress, however, that each BHL node and institution must follow the copyright laws of their own countries, and, as BHL is not a legal entity, it is ultimately each scanning institution that is legally responsible for the content they contribute to the collection.

Bianca Crowley on BHL Collections Development

Bianca Crowley then gave our African colleagues some insight into the BHL-US/UK collection development process, outlining our selection and de-duplication process, digitization principles, metadata requirements, and content integration. Communication and collaboration methods were a key point of discussion, as they are critical for successful collections development.

Grace Costantino followed with a presentation on BHL-US/UK’s use of social media, which allows us to communicate project developments, provide context to the books in our collection, reach new audiences on new platforms, and uncover hidden gems in our collection. Following the presentation, an open discussion about each institution’s current use of social media, social media in the context of Africa, and how BHL-Africa might use social media occurred.

Finally, William Ulate detailed the BHL infrastructure, demoing the Macaw tool developed by Joel Richard at the Smithsonian Libraries, which is used to ingest books through Internet Archive into BHL. A remote installation of Macaw is running at the University of Pretoria and can be accessed via the web by any BHL-Africa participant to load digitized content into BHL.

BHL-African participants were also given a chance, on day two, to break out into two working groups, dedicated to Collections Development/Copyright and Outreach/Communication. These sessions allowed participants to apply the information given during the presentations to the realities of the BHL-Africa project.

The final day of the meeting (Wednesday, April 17) was spent identifying preliminary tasks for a two-year BHL-Africa workplan and electing a BHL-Africa Steering Committee. Workplan components include establishing a list of titles that each institution wishes to contribute to BHL; drafting documentation, based largely on existing files from gBHL, for workflow and collaboration guidance; and drafting a preliminary communication and outreach plan, which addresses not only external, but also internal, communication needs.

BHL-Africa Steering Committee (Left to Right): Lawrence Monda (Technical Advisor), Ashah Owano, Loi Namugenyi, Anne-Lise Fourie, Ria Groenewald

The BHL-Africa Steering Committee was also elected at the meeting. BHL-Africa has been divided into three regional nodes: North/Central; Eastern; Southern. Each regional node elects two representatives for the Steering Committee. Currently, there is no representation in North/Central Africa within the project, so only four members (two from Southern, two from Eastern) were elected at the meeting. Elected members include: Anne-Lise Fourie (SANBI, Southern); Ria Groenewald (University of Pretoria, Southern); Ashah Owano (National Museums of Kenya, Eastern); and Loi Namugenyi (Uganda National Council for Science and Technology, Eastern). Lawrence Monda (National Museums of Kenya) was elected as the BHL-Africa Technical Representative. Two additional members will be elected as North/Central institutions are added to the BHL fold. The Steering Committee will be responsible for providing strategic guidance, developing fundraising plans and approving budgets, and organizing pan-continental efforts.

The three-day BHL-Africa launch and workshop was an extremely successful event which resulted in the creation of an actionable plan for project development and the identification of notably capable leadership. Meeting attendees left feeling energized, with a clear sense of purpose. Just one and a half years ago, at the Life and Literature conference, the concept of BHL-Africa was born. Today, it is a reality. We congratulate our colleagues on the astounding progress they have made and look forward to seeing great things from BHL-Africa!

Irina Zeylikovich

I knew I was going to have a good University of Michigan School of Information Alternative Spring Break when my project mentor, Bianca Crowley, told me to meet at the Easter Island head. But that’s just how the Biodiversity Heritage Library rolls.

Not a Dum-Dum!

Part of BHL is currently housed in the Smithsonian’s National Museum in Natural History, so on Monday March 4, I purposefully strode through it’s grand doors to begin my weeklong project on creating social media campaigns that would cast a wider net and draw more people to the amazing content that the Biodiversity Heritage Library has online.

My project involved a dual approach – I would work on both a sustainable workflow that made sense for the BHL staff to actively utilize and continue after my departure, as well as a list of topics that had the potential to pique the interest of lots of people and also had relevant content in BHL. I began with an environmental scan to understand how other peer institutions were engaging audiences on social media, as well as locating storytelling best practices and effective marketing tools for BHL’s ready reference later. Then came the bulk of the project: establishing the workflow and generating campaign ideas.

After looking at several options, my project mentors and I decided on two types of shared documents: a high-level list of campaign ideas that included additional information such as date dependencies (for example, if the campaign was tied to a commemorative month, such as the recent Women’s History Month campaign). Each of the campaigns listed in that document would also link to a much more detailed campaign file that would hold resources – factoids, links to BHL images, peer organizations, hashtags, relevant Facebook pages, etc. – to assist in creating content for the campaign itself. The remainder of my time was spent fleshing out one of the campaigns, but I won’t spoil the surprise – you’ll just have to wait to read it!

Bianca also treated me to a phenomenal last day fit for every (future) librarian: a visit to the Library of Congress for a lecture by the director of the Bibliotheca Alexandria, Ismail Serageldin – a truly gifted speaker and inspiration to all librarians (and in my opinion, all educators in general). We followed this with a visit to the US Copyright Office to doublecheck the copyright status of a work that was likely going to be digitized and added to the BHL online collection. This was truly a revelation for me since the copyright claims before 1978 have not been digitized yet, so we sought our claimants amidst rooms of card catalogs.

Inside the US (C) Office Catalog Room

Copyright register card example

“Snowquester” but where’s the snow?

I learned quite a bit in my brief (even a little briefer than normal thanks to Wednesday’s “Snowquester”) week with BHL. I manage a blog as my role at the Taubman Health Sciences Library, but am far less involved on other social media, so this was a great addition to my professional experience, and I hope that my efforts help a truly wonderful organization with incredibly dedicated staff. I know I’m in the right field when I hear colleagues discussing the amazing power of metadata and when I can witness the discovery of hidden collections. I was also able to see the amount of labor required to make this process a reality. Having so much of the content users normally interact with being born digital, I think we forget that for every page of a hand-printed/illustrated work that goes online, someone had to find the work, check its copyright status, scan it carefully page by page, tag as much with metadata (otherwise how would you have found that there is a gorgeous illustration of a lemur on that page?) as is feasible, create a platform to keep all of these pages online, and lastly get you to actually see it.

The most rewarding aspect of my time at BHL is undoubtedly seeing how people far and wide use these collections in ways the original creators could never have anticipated: in art, historical analysis, biodiversity research, and climate change tracking. If my efforts over Alternative Spring Break can lead even one additional person to BHL’s content where they may not have known about it before, that’ll make for a pretty thrilled (future) librarian.

-Irina Zeylikovich @sfobound

In October, 2011, BHL Staff conducted a usability test of the BHL US/UK portal, assessing its functionality and comparing it with that of the BHL-Australia portal. While several recommendations arose from that exercise, two of the most emphatic were a need to improve the BHL search functionality and a desire to make the BHL US/UK portal more aesthetically pleasing.

You spoke, and we listened. Today, we’re excited to announce the release of a new and improved BHL interface and search capability! 

As far as improving the aesthetics of our site go, we couldn’t think of a better approach than incorporating some of the amazing Flickr images our users have grown to love. On the new BHL homepage, you’ll now see a selection of the over 29,000 illustrations in the BHL Flickr, with the option to view more of the collection in Flickr (by clicking on the “View Additional Images” link) or the specific image within BHL (by clicking on the actual image).

We’ve also updated the social aspect of the site by including our @BioDivLibrary Twitter stream and relocating our social media buttons for Twitter, Facebook, Slideshare, and Flickr to the homepage header for better accessibility. You’ll also find a new and improved Featured Collections box, which will highlight special collections of BHL materials, particularly those included in the BHL iTunes U.

Search Improvements

While we know aesthetics are important, we also know that the meat and potatoes of the recommendations from our usability test center around a need to improve the BHL search.

The new enhanced search addresses metadata only, not OCR text within a book or scientific names.  Think of this as a better search across library metadata.  The search function is a Google-like search that provides fuzzier searching across titles, authors, subjects and dates, while still allowing the exact searches that many of our users have come to love, as indicated in user surveys. Search results are returned according to a relevance ranking, and can be sorted by that ranking, by year, by author, or by date published.

Some example searches now enabled include:

• Keyword searches:
  • annals missouri
• Exact search:
  • “annals of the missouri botanical garden” (include quotes)
• Complex searches:
  • annals or missouri (note the use of “or”)
  • “Charles Darwin” letters (combination of exact phrase and keywords)
  • darwin descent 1871 (author, title keywords, year published)
• Abbreviations:
  • proc boston soc nat hist
  • sys nat 1758 (abbreviation and year published)

You can also do more complicated searches by clicking on the “Books/Journals” search tab to include volume information and editions into your search criteria.

These search improvements have also been made to BHL’s APIs, including its OpenURL resolver, enabling developers easier access to BHL’s data for inclusion in third party applications.

Spend some time with our new site and feel free to give us your feedback by commenting on this post, sending us website feedback, or sending messages to us on Twitter or Facebook! We know you’ll be as excited about these improvements as we are.

Several months ago, we introduced a new BHL logo, and to publicize the event, we published a blog post that detailed the various images that BHL Staff Members saw within the abstract lines of our new logo. At the end of the post, we asked our users to share their interpretations of the logo with us as well. Many of you did, and, as promised, we’re sharing those today. We send a special thanks to all of you who shared your thoughts with us, and if our logo inspires other ideas, don’t hesitate to share them by commenting on this blog, sending us a tweet (@BioDivLibrary), or posting on our Facebook wall.

1) Water: Two users, Aloysius Horn and an anonymous user, left comments on our previous blog post indicating the logo looked like water/waves to them.

2) Mountains: Via a comment left on a our blog, John told us that our new logo reminded him of mountains.

3) Butterfly Wings: Sanlin replied, via Twitter, that our logo looked like the flapping wings of a butterfly.

4) Humpback Whale Tail: Peter Desmet commented via our previous blog post that our logo is “obviously the tail of a humpback whale disappearing behind the waves.”

5) Flower: An anonymous user on our blog suggested that the logo looks like the petals of a flower.

6) Our final suggestion involved our former logo, which contained a double-helix and a butterfly. Matt Person (a BHL staff member at MBL-WHOI) told us via Twitter that, in the new logo, he envisioned “a great double helix about to emerge from the center of the logo with a butterfly darting about the top of it.”

If you’ve visited our site in the past few days, or follow our blog, you know that BHL now has a new and improved logo! We have our friends at BHL-Australia to thank for this exciting new development, as our logo is a modified version of their own eye-catching design. Before the BHL-Au logo designer, Simon O’Shea, left the BHL-Au project for a new assignment with Lonely Planet, he contributed his creative talent to adapt his original design for our use. He also provided style guidelines that can help extend the use of the logo globally. For access to files of our new logo, or the guidelines surrounding its use, visit out Logo page on our Public Wiki.