BHL Moves Forward 2014 an update

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1 BHL Moves Forward 2014 an update Susan Fraser European Botanical and Horticultural Libraries Group 21 st Annual Meeting, May Dubrovnik, Croatia

book dealing in the remotest way with the subjects

3 In any well- appointed Natural History Library there should be found every book and every edition of every book dealing in the remotest way with the subjects concerned. Charles Davis Sherborn Epilogue to Index Animalium

4 The BHL is a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries that cooperate to digitize and make accessible the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections and to make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global biodiversity commons.

5 What is the BHL? BHL is a massive dataset Useful for multidisciplinary research -Systematics -Humanities -Natural Language Processing -Natural History Illustration

7 Taxonomic Intelligence million name strings in NameBank Uses sophisticated algorithms to locate likely name strings in OCR texts Serves up millions of pages of digitized literature and natural history illustrations.

14 In order to increase the number of names in BHL we continue

15 Processing of BHL texts will increase the number of name strings in NameBank and increase the accuracy of name string recognition. 43 million+ pages scanned 70.4 million name strings found 56.2 million names verified with a Namebank ID 1.4 million unique names with a Namebank ID 3.3 million unique names *without* a Namebank ID

16 Scan request form General feedback form

17 Macaw Users can now upload to a cloud server, after which the files go to the Internet Archive and then the BHL portal The Macaw software is in test mode at Harvard and The New York Botanical Garden. The University of Pretoria will start soon

18 Collaborations BHL has allowed several institutions to collaborate more easily on special projects.

20 Developing an automated way to locate illustrations in natural history literature and provide metadata for them. The project also includes enhancing existing tools to enable sorting and editing, integrating tagging applications so users can edit descriptive metadata, and integrating user-generated metadata

21 Flickr Photo Stream Now has over 90,536 images

Purposeful Gaming Engage the public in improving and enhancing access to digital texts Goal: to develop a game that will encourage crowdsourcing to supplement enhancement of

22 Purposeful Gaming Engage the public in improving and enhancing access to digital texts Goal: to develop a game that will encourage crowdsourcing to supplement enhancement of content, specifically correcting OCR and transcribing field notes and seed catalogs Partners: Missouri Botanical Garden Harvard University Cornell University The New York Botanical Garden

26 Using transcription tools develop by the Atlas of Living Australia and From the Pages

27 Crowdsourcing and Purposeful Gaming

Digging into Data Challenge A competition to develop new insights, tools and skills in innovative humanities and social science research using largescale data analysis Grants to investigate how

28 Digging into Data Challenge A competition to develop new insights, tools and skills in innovative humanities and social science research using largescale data analysis Grants to investigate how computational techniques can be applied to big data ; changing the nature of humanities and social sciences research. Each team represents collaborations among scholars, scientists, and information professionals from leading universities and libraries in Europe and North America. The project s prime objective is to promote the efficient access to and sharing of large-scale biodiversity legacy literature. Integrate novel text mining methods, visualization, crowdsourcing and social media into the BHL to provide a semantic search system aimed to transform BHL into a next-generation social digital library resource. Increase collaboration, interaction and sharing of information among BHL users via the social media environment.

29 Why is it important? All we know for some organisms is a brief description in a hard to find book held in one of the great natural history or botanical libraries A library that is all to often far from the reader!

30 Growing consortium BHL Central 16 institutions in the United States 2 institutions in the United Kingdom 1 institution in Singapore Global nodes elsewhere in Africa, Australia, Brazil, China, Egypt, Europe

31 BHL (Central) continues to evolve New collaborations New members and affiliates Evolving governance structure Expanding collections.

32 The worlds single, largest, open-licensed source of biodiversity literature. 76,000+ titles 137,000+ volumes 43+ million pages

33 Inspiring discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge Thank you EBHL!

biodiversity heritage library SmithsonianCampaign Smithsonian Libraries

biodiversity heritage library SmithsonianCampaign Smithsonian Libraries A World of Knowledge About Life on Earth Around the globe, scientists are investigating our planet s biological diversity the complex