Smithsonian Libraries 2.0and the

Biodiversity Heritage Library Project

Martin R. KalfatovicSmithsonian Institution Libraries

Smithsonian Libraries :: SIL Board Meeting :: 26 June 2009

It's all about metrics!

Social Media / New MediaWhat’s the R.O.I.?

Return on Investment

Return on Intellect

Social Media in Use at SIL

Social Media

• Blog

• Twitter

• FaceBook

• Flickr

• Flickr Commons

• LinkedIn

• YouTube

• Wiki

Existing Customers New Customers

Exi

stin

g P

rodu

cts

New

Pro

duct

s Leveraging SIL Content and Staff

New Media in Production

Digital Imaging For:

• Online project

• Product Development & Licensing

• Researcher needs

Case Study

BHL Focus: Literature

BHL Focus: Literature

Over 250 years of systematic description of life

Systema naturae (10th ed. 1758) by Carl von Linné

Taxonomic Literature

Taxonomic descriptions must be published for the name to be valid

Publications must be available to the public through trusted sources

Libraries have been the traditional place

Taxonomic Literature

The Taxonomic Impediment

“The taxonomic impediment is a term that describes the gaps of knowledge in our taxonomic system”

- Darwin Declaration, 1998

Taxonomic Impediment

Specimen collectionsDatabasesPublicationsObservations‘Gray’ literatureIndex cardsField notebooks

Biologia Centrali-Americana

Biologia Centrali-AmericanaEdited by Frederick Ducane Godman and Osbert SalvinLondon : Pub. for the editors by R. H. Porter, 1879-1915

Chart showing distribution in public collections of the complete 63 volume sets held worldwide.2 complete copies in Central America held at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Library

• 2003. Telluride. Encyclopedia of Life meeting

• February 2005. London. Library and Laboratory: the Marriage of Research, Data and Taxonomic Literature

• May 2005. Washington. Ground work for the Biodiversity Heritage Library

• June 2006. Washington. Organizational and Technical meeting

• August 2006. New York Botanical Garden. BHL Director’s Meeting.

• October 2006. St. Louis/San Francisco. Technical meetings

• February 2007. Museum of Comparative Zoology. Organizational meeting

• May 2007. Encyclopedia of Life and BHL Portal Launch. Washington DC.

American Museum of Natural History (New York)

Field Museum (Chicago)

Natural History Museum (London)

Smithsonian Institution Libraries (Washington)

Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis)

New York Botanical Garden (New York)

Royal Botanic Garden, Kew

Botany Libraries, Harvard University

Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University

Marine Biological Laboratory / Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Academy of Natural Sciences (Philadelphia)

California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco)

BHL – EuropeLaunched in May 2009• 28 Institutions• 14 countries• 3.4 million funding for three years Discussions underway with the Chinese Academy of Science and the Atlas of Living Australia for BHL components

Smithsonian Libraries and BHL

• Hosts the BHL Project Director (Tom Garnett)• Hosts the BHL Collections Coordinator (Bianca Lipscomb)• Serves on the Institutional Council (Nancy Gwinn)•Serves on BHL Technical Committee (Martin Kalfatovic)• Provides technical workflow assistance in systems development (Keri Thompson)• Coordinates metadata across BHL partners (Suzanne Pilsk)• Provides selection advice (staff of Natural History Libraries)

Initial grant from the MacArthur and Sloan Foundations (as part of the Encyclopedia of Life grant)

Additional support from parent institutions

Supplemental grants in place for specific development (e.g. Moore Foundation for Fedora)

Additional grants being actively pursued by BHL and individual members

Costs

10 cents per page (scanning costs from Internet Archive)

13 cents per page for additional SIL provided work (administration, pulling materials, scanning quality review, metadata review, etc.)

Average book length 304 pages

Average cost per book: $70.00

How much is there:

Core literature pre-1923: 100 million pages (?)

All pre-1923: 120-150 million pages

All literature: 280-320 million pages

…Names…Rectification of Names (Cheng Ming)What is necessary is to rectify names … If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.The Analects of ConfuciusBook 13, verse 3 (Legge translation, 1980)

- Specimen- Plate or other visual image- Taxonomic description

11.1 million name strings in NameBank

Uses sophisticated algorithm (TaxonGrab) to locate likely name strings in OCR text

Iterative processing of BHL texts will both increase the number of name strings in NameBank and increase the accuracy of name string recognition

Taxonomic Intelligence

Build Content

What about copyright?

Permissions

• Seek permissions from copyright holders

• Opt in Copyright Model: The BHL will actively work with professional societies and associations to integrate their publications into the BHL in a way that serves the societies’ missions and goals

• BHL will digitize learned society backfiles and mount them through the BHL Portal at no cost.

• Will provide a set of files to the publishers for reuse as they see fit

BHL Advantages for publishers

• Use of the articles will increase as evidenced by citation upsurge

• Long-term management of the digital assets is provided by the BHL at no cost

• Publishers’ content is embedded in the emerging knowledge ecology that is sweeping biology in this century

• Structural mark-up of backfiles into conformance with NLM DTD (just starting)

How to make THIS into 0’s and 1’s

Smithsonian Institution Libraries

– Smithsonian publications

– Entomology collection

– Marine mammals

– Fishes

– Selected special collections materials

– Filling in behind other libraries

Rough Selection

Single Scribe MachineCustom built by the Internet ArchiveHuman operated3,500 page per shift per day

Northeast Regional Scanning Center

– 10 Scribe machines

– MBL/WHOI

– Harvard

Jersey City Facility

– 10 Scribe machines

– AMNH

– NYBG

University of Illinois

– 2 Scribe machines

Natural History Museum, London

– 1 Scribe machine

Missouri Botanical Garden

– Non-Scribe operation

Washington, DC

– 1 Scribe machine at Smithsonian Libraries

– 10 Scribe facility at Library of Congress

BHL Scanning StatsJune 2009

Pages in production:

13,913,634

Items in production:

34,724

Titles in production:

13,108

Smithsonian Scanning StatsJune 2009

Pages in production:

2,058,420

Items in production:

5,725

Titles in production:

3,38

UsersJanuary – May 2009

221,532 visitors

1,147,773 page views

2.11% of traffic comes from Wikipedia

The BHL Portal is not a library catalog

The BHL Portal!

Plant Names

Specimens

Plant Names

Plant NamesSpecimensDescriptions

Plant Names

Plant Names

Citations

BHL 2.0• BHL Blog

for communication of technical notes and publicity

• TwitterAnnouncements, commentary, etc.

• FlickrCollection highlights, publicity

• Other?SecondLife, LibraryThing, OpenLibrary

Encyclopedia of Life…imagine for a moment that all the diversity of the world were finally revealed and then described, say one page to a species. The description would contain the scientific name, a photograph or drawing, a brief diagnosis, and information of where the species if found. If published in conventional book form … this Great Encyclopedia of Life would occupy 60 meters of library shelf per million species … 100 million species of organisms … would extend through 6 kilometers of shelving …

E.O. Wilson (1992)

H

InformaticsMarine Biological Laboratory

Missouri Botanical Garden

Species Pages & SecretariatSmithsonian

Education and OutreachSmithsonian & Harvard

Synthesis CenterField Museum

Built from a variety of new and existing sources

Views available for varying levels of expertise from novice to expert

Legacy literature a key component of the EOL species pages

Encyclopedia of Life Species Pages

Encyclopedia of Life

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 Davies Sherborn, Epilogue to Index Animalium,

March 1922

A Global Library for Life

Thanks for sticking around!

BHL Portalhttp://www.biodiversitylibrary.org

Citehttp://cite.biodiversitylibrary.org

Internet Archivehttp://www.archive.org

Ubiohttp://www.ubio.org

Links

Credits

• Chris Freeland

• Suzanne Pilsk

• Tom Garnett

• Cathy Norton

• David Remsen