The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a digital library that provides open access to biodiversity literature. It aggregates metadata and full text from over 15 member institutions. The summary discusses some of the challenges in aggregating metadata from different sources and ensuring accurate taxonomic name finding. User feedback is critical for improving the platform. The impact of BHL is highlighted through examples of how it has helped researchers access historical literature when physical access was limited. BHL is working to make content more accessible by packaging it for new audiences and platforms through tools like APIs and partnerships with other biodiversity databases.
An International Cooperative Digital Library for Taxonomic Literature: The Bi...Martin Kalfatovic
An International Cooperative Digital Library for Taxonomic Literature: The Biodiversity Heritage Library. Martin Kalfatovic. The Catholic University of America, School of Library and Information Science. LSC 715. 6 June 2008. Washington, DC.
BHL and Specimen Collection Data: The needle in the Festuca stackMartin Kalfatovic
BHL and Specimen Collection Data: The needle in the Festuca stack
Biodiversity_Next | 23 October 2019 | Leiden
Martin R. Kalfatovic. BHL Program Director | Biodiversity Heritage Library. ORCID: 0000-0002-4563-4627. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.3.37787
Digitizing Entomology: The Biodiversity Heritage Library @ the SmithsonianMartin Kalfatovic
Digitizing Entomology: The Biodiversity Heritage Library @ the Smithsonian. Martin R. Kalfatovic. National Museum of Natural History, Department of Entomology Staff Meeting. Martin R. Kalfatovic. November 26, 2007. Washington, DC.
An Inordinate Fondness for Data: The Biodiversity Heritage LibraryMartin Kalfatovic
An Inordinate Fondness for Data: The Biodiversity Heritage Library. Martin R. Kalfatovic. OCLC Digital Forum East 2009. November 5, 2009. Arlington, VA.
Biodiversity Heritage Library: Cornerstone of the Encyclopedia of LifeMartin Kalfatovic
Presentation at the Biodiversity Heritage Library @ Smithsonian Libraries event during ALA (June 25, 2007) held at the National Museum of Natural History. Updated and ported to PowerPoint version
An International Cooperative Digital Library for Taxonomic Literature: The Bi...Martin Kalfatovic
An International Cooperative Digital Library for Taxonomic Literature: The Biodiversity Heritage Library. Martin Kalfatovic. The Catholic University of America, School of Library and Information Science. LSC 715. 6 June 2008. Washington, DC.
BHL and Specimen Collection Data: The needle in the Festuca stackMartin Kalfatovic
BHL and Specimen Collection Data: The needle in the Festuca stack
Biodiversity_Next | 23 October 2019 | Leiden
Martin R. Kalfatovic. BHL Program Director | Biodiversity Heritage Library. ORCID: 0000-0002-4563-4627. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.3.37787
Digitizing Entomology: The Biodiversity Heritage Library @ the SmithsonianMartin Kalfatovic
Digitizing Entomology: The Biodiversity Heritage Library @ the Smithsonian. Martin R. Kalfatovic. National Museum of Natural History, Department of Entomology Staff Meeting. Martin R. Kalfatovic. November 26, 2007. Washington, DC.
An Inordinate Fondness for Data: The Biodiversity Heritage LibraryMartin Kalfatovic
An Inordinate Fondness for Data: The Biodiversity Heritage Library. Martin R. Kalfatovic. OCLC Digital Forum East 2009. November 5, 2009. Arlington, VA.
Biodiversity Heritage Library: Cornerstone of the Encyclopedia of LifeMartin Kalfatovic
Presentation at the Biodiversity Heritage Library @ Smithsonian Libraries event during ALA (June 25, 2007) held at the National Museum of Natural History. Updated and ported to PowerPoint version
The Biodiversity Heritage Library: A Cornerstone of the Encyclopedia of LifeMartin Kalfatovic
Presentation at the Biodiversity Heritage Library @ Smithsonian Libraries event during ALA (June 25, 2007) held at the National Museum of Natural History
The Biodiversity Heritage Library: Workflow OverviewMartin Kalfatovic
The Biodiversity Heritage Library: Workflow Overview. Martin R. Kalfatovic and Suzanne C. Pilsk. BHL Australian Node Meeting: Melbourne Museum. 2 June 2010. Melbourne, Australia.
Digital Services Division & The Biodiversity Heritage LibraryMartin Kalfatovic
Digital Services Division & The Biodiversity Heritage Library. Martin R. Kalfatovic. Smithsonian Science Executive Committee. Washington, DC. 12 January 2015
This was a talk for the St Louis Chapter of Special Libraries Association about library-related projects going on in the Center for Biodiversity Informatics at Missouri Botanical Garden
The Biodiversity Heritage Library: Corn-fed, Missouri Raised, Going GlobalMartin Kalfatovic
The Biodiversity Heritage Library: Corn-fed, Missouri Raised, Going Global. Martin R. Kalfatovic. Missouri Botanical Garden Staff Meeting. August 19, 2009. Saint Louis, MO.
Empowering Global Research: User Stories from the Biodiversity Heritage Librarycostantinog
Presentation from the evening reception at the 2018 Annual Meeting in Los Angeles. Presentation shared user stories highlighting how BHL is supporting research in global science, conservation, and museum work.
The Biodiversity Heritage Library: A Cornerstone of the Encyclopedia of LifeMartin Kalfatovic
Presentation at the Biodiversity Heritage Library @ Smithsonian Libraries event during ALA (June 25, 2007) held at the National Museum of Natural History
The Biodiversity Heritage Library: Workflow OverviewMartin Kalfatovic
The Biodiversity Heritage Library: Workflow Overview. Martin R. Kalfatovic and Suzanne C. Pilsk. BHL Australian Node Meeting: Melbourne Museum. 2 June 2010. Melbourne, Australia.
Digital Services Division & The Biodiversity Heritage LibraryMartin Kalfatovic
Digital Services Division & The Biodiversity Heritage Library. Martin R. Kalfatovic. Smithsonian Science Executive Committee. Washington, DC. 12 January 2015
This was a talk for the St Louis Chapter of Special Libraries Association about library-related projects going on in the Center for Biodiversity Informatics at Missouri Botanical Garden
The Biodiversity Heritage Library: Corn-fed, Missouri Raised, Going GlobalMartin Kalfatovic
The Biodiversity Heritage Library: Corn-fed, Missouri Raised, Going Global. Martin R. Kalfatovic. Missouri Botanical Garden Staff Meeting. August 19, 2009. Saint Louis, MO.
Empowering Global Research: User Stories from the Biodiversity Heritage Librarycostantinog
Presentation from the evening reception at the 2018 Annual Meeting in Los Angeles. Presentation shared user stories highlighting how BHL is supporting research in global science, conservation, and museum work.
Digitalización de literatura de Biodiversidad: an Overview of the Biodiversit...Martin Kalfatovic
Digitalización de literatura de Biodiversidad: an Overview of the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Martin R. Kalfatovic and William Ulate. CONABIO Teleconference. 29 August 2013.
A presentation on select international digital library initiatives by Rupesh Kumar A, Assistant Professor, Department of Studies and Research in Library and Information Science, Tumkur University, Karnataka, India.
An Overview of Activities and Projects: The Biodiversity Heritage LibraryMartin Kalfatovic
An Overview of Activities and Projects: The Biodiversity Heritage Library. Martin R. Kalfatovic. Workshop Coleção de Obras Raras Essencial. 3-5 February 2010. São Paulo, Brazil.
Free and Open Access to Biodiversity Literature: An Introduction to the Biodi...Martin Kalfatovic
Free and Open Access to Biodiversity Literature: An Introduction to the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Martin R. Kalfatovic. Library of Congress. 1 June 2017.
The Biodiversity Heritage Library: Origin | Growth | PartnershipsMartin Kalfatovic
The Biodiversity Heritage Library: Origin | Growth | Partnerships. Martin R. Kalfatovic. Biodiversity Heritage Library Organization and Planning Meeting. Kirstenbosch, Cape Town, South Africa. 14 June 2012. . Washington, DC. 24 May 2012.
Presented at Industry Symposium, IFLA, 14 August 2008. Describes a new environment of global information services using metadata, taxonomies, and knowledge organization. Makes the case that these changes will permanently affect what it means "to catalog" materials for the purpose of connecting citizens, students and scholars to the information they need, when and where they need it.
Expanding Access for the Local and Global Increasing Access & Empowering Glob...Martin Kalfatovic
Expanding Access for the Local and Global Increasing Access & Empowering Global Biodiversity Research through the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Martin R. Kalfatovic. 2018 Ohio Natural History Conference. Cleveland Museum of Natural History. 24 February 2018.
Presentation at the Online Information Conference, London 20th November 2013. Taking a look at the drivers behind the emerging Web of Data and how libraries need to be and can be part of it in the future.
1. Biodiversity Heritage Library:
A Mass Scanning Mix of Metadata
Bianca Crowley, Collections Coordinator
Biodiversity Heritage Library
Smithsonian LibrariesJun-13
2.
3. BHL Overview
• http://biodiversitylibrary.org
• New user interface launched in March
• Search by title, author, article, subjects and
scientific names
• Various download options, even high
resolution
• Taxonomic name finding algorithm
• Machine-to-machine services
6. Metadata
1. Titles vs. Items vs. Segments
2. Metadata we need:
• MARC for book and journal titles
• Volume information
• Page data
BHL Term Library Term Meaning Metadata
Title Book or Journal
Titles
Conceptual Unit MARC record
Item Volume, Piece Object Derived from holdings +
created @ digitization
Segment Article, Book
Chapter, Part
Section of
consecutive pgs
Harvested from BioStor.org
or created post digitization
8. Metadata Challenges
• BHL collection aggregates metadata from 15
member library catalogs
• Also aggregating metadata from a couple
hundred Internet Archive contributors
• Default page metadata created at time of
scanning lacks detail esp. for plates, figures, etc.
• Taxonomic name finding algorithm only as good
as optical character recognition (OCR)
13. Impact
• “BHL came to the rescue when a planned trip to work in the Mertz Library at The New
York Botanical Garden had to be cancelled due to Hurricane Sandy. Thanks to the online
resources available through BHL I was able to source most of the key works I needed,
with their supporting bibliographic information. Further use of BHL occurred when
building work at the Linnean Society of London limited access to some of the book I had
been able to use from that collection."
• “I would like thank you all very much for invaluable work and support you do. I just got a
pdf-file from more than century old (1893) journal paper (regional naturalist society
paper, published in Finland), to get copy I should take 500 mile drive to our university
library. Now I am got it fastly in high-quality pdf-copy. Cordial thanks and all success in
continuing your highly valuable mission.” [conservation biologist from Estonia]
• “You are a wonderful resource. I maintain a Website that describes the plant genus
Opuntia (prickly pear cacti). There is no way I could maintain such a site without access to
literature from 100-200 years ago. Most of the cactus species were discovered long ago; I
find it invaluable to put up PDF files to document each species in the literature as I
document them photographically. I am a botanist, but I work in the pharmaceutical field
(not so many botanical jobs out there). Your library makes it possible for me to continue
working with plants in a meaningful and scientific manner.”
14. • Repackaging content in new ways for new
audiences via:
– flickr, Facebook, Twitter, & Pinterest
– iTunes U & iBooks
• Open data & APIs
– Put content where users are already working
(Encyclopedia of Life-EOL.org, Int’l Plant Names Index-
IPNI.org, Tropicos.org)
– Gets power users to work for us (for free!) e.g.
BioStor.org, synynyms.com
A free & open access digital library for biodiversity literature and primary source materials (field books)A consortium of 15 libraries working together to run a virtual library branchA collection of content from the 15 member BHL consortium and other Internet Archive contributorsAnyone is free to access & download BHL materials
SIL employees work to scan SIL contentSIL also hosts BHL Secretariat: BHL Program Director, BHL Program Manager, BHL Collections CoordinatorNancy Gwinn = BHL Executive ChairFederal support received for the past 2 years and ongoing!
Each of the 15 BHL member libraries work together to select unique content for scanningThen we send the books from our shelves and the metadata from our library catalogs to the Internet Archive for scanningThe Internet Archive does the heavy lifting of digitization, derivative file creation and packaging all image and metadata files together for storageWe harvest the files from the IA database to our BHL database managed by the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis
Overview of types of metadata we needMetadata flows from our library catalogs to the Internet Archive and then to BHLWe derive the metadata we display in the BHL website from the original MARC record of the contributing library
Example of the original MARC record in SIRIS and in the backend BHL database vs. the metadata derived from the original MARC and displayed on the BHL websiteNotice also the differences in the volume information. This is b/c AMNH contributed some volumes in addition to the SIL contributed volumes.It is often the case that multiple BHL member libraries need to work together to complete a seriesWe don’t have the time to standardize volume metadata coming from different libraries at the time of scanning but we can modify this information after it appears in our collection
Curating the BHL collection = critical piece of post-digitization workflowRequires loginWeb-based Administrative interface to access the backend BHL database so that we can make corrections to our collection as necessaryWith over 60,000 titles and 114,000 volumes – how do we manage our curation activities?!
User feedback is key; we rely on the many eyes of the crowd to help us direct our curation activities to the content people are actually usingUsers can let us know if they find a problem with something in our collection through our general feedback form and place a request for something to be scanned through our scanning request form
BHL uses an issue tracking system, known as Gemini, to manage the feedback we receive from usersNearly all consortium member libraries participate in responding to user feedback via this systemEssential to BHL day-to-day workKey to communicating at level of granularity we needExcellent documentation tool
The majority of the content in the BHL collection is public domainHowever we have agreements to provide access to over 270 in-copyright titles under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike licenseAs part of the volume metadata, we include data about copyright status and licensing if applicable – 3 different tiers As an open access project it is critical that we manage our copyright metadata; focus on managing in-copyright as well as “due diligence” volumesOpen data available under a Creative Commons Zero license = public domain dedication