Botanicus.org is a freely accessible digital library created by the Missouri Botanical Garden that contains over 650,000 pages of digitized botanical literature from 1,300 volumes and 200 titles. The library aims to make historic botanical literature more accessible by applying emerging technologies like optical character recognition to digitize texts. It has digitized over 145,000 taxonomic descriptions. The digitization process involves selecting materials, preparing metadata, digitizing pages, applying optical character recognition software, and publishing the materials online for public access.

1. Botanicus.org: Applying emerging technology to historic scientific literature Chris Freeland Doug Holland Missouri Botanical Garden

4. Taxonomic Literature The cited half-life of publications in taxonomy is longer than in any other scientific discipline * * * The decay rate is longer than in any scientific discipline - Macro-economic case for open access, Tom Moritz

5. How historic literature is used

8. Workflow Selection Preparation Post Production Publication Metadata Enhancement Digitization Conservation

9. Selection

11. Digitization 5 Full time scanners 3 Indus 5002 book scanners 1 Kodak i280 Sheet feed scanner

14. Enhancement - Paginator

15. View

20. 9. Page View

23. TIF Image from Scanner Converted to text via PrimeOCR Name finding via bTaxonGrab Extract names Submit to TaxonFinder SOAP response SciLINC in action…

24. Taxonomic Impedectomy Prof. Newton wrote me that he is extremely excited about your digitization project. At the moment he and his graduate botany students in Kenya have access to very few resources . He spends his summer terms at Kew doing his research for the next year's teaching and writing, but he tells me that now, because of what is already on your site, he will not have to carry so much back to Kenya for his research and his students but can download and work with your resources right there. -- excerpt re: Botanicus from email August 2006

28. www.biodiversitylibrary.org