BHL Technical Status Update on Current Priorities by Technical Director W.Ulate.

1. Status Update:
what are BHL’s current priorities?
William Ulate, Martin Kalfatovic
S. Dillon Ripley Center
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
12 November 2015

2. Technical Group at MBG
Mike Lichtenberg
Developer
Trish Rose-Sandler
Data Analyst
William Ulate
Technical Director

3. Technical Support
MBG IT Division
Manage servers, systems and
telecommunications.
Installs software needed
And others:
MBL
Smithsonian
Internet Archive
BHL-Australia
BHL-Europe

4. Technical Advisory Group

6. BHL Work Plan 2015 - 2017
http://bit.ly/2136eP7

7. Priorities
BHL Infrastructure at SIL
DOI’s for Articles
NEH Art of Life ٧
IMLS Purposeful Gaming To end by Nov. 30th
IMLS Mining Biodiversity To end by Dec. 31st
(1 year No-cost ext.)

8. Art of Life

9. Art of Life

10. Art of Life

11. Currently….
We have now processed the 35 million pages that
we committed to for the project.
Significantly more numbers of BHL images are
now available on Flickr (see BHL blog post on
tagging over 1 million images)
We launched a selection of 19th century BHL
images in the Zooniverse platform this
week (see BHL blog post on Science Gossip)

12. Science Gossip
(sciencegossip.org/)

13. Purposeful Gaming

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15. OCR Improvements
Gaming
Transcription

16. Purposeful gaming and BHL:
engaging the public in improving and
enhancing access to digital texts
IMLS Grant Program:
National Leadership Grants for Libraries
Partners:
Missouri Botanical Garden
Harvard University
Cornell University
New York Botanical Garden
P.I.: Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden
Dates: Dec 2013 – Nov. 2015

17. Project objectives and benefits
Test new means of crowdsourcing to support the
enhancement of content in BHL
Demonstrate if digital games are an effective tool for
analyzing and improving digital outputs from OCR and
transcription
Benefits of gaming include:
improved access to content by providing richer and more
accurate data;
an extension of limited staff resources; and
exposure of library content to communities who may not
know about the collections otherwise.

18. Beanstalk and Smorball
Smorballgame.org
Beanstalkgame.or

19. Purposeful Gaming
Trish Rose-Sandler
Principal Investigator
Purposeful Gaming and BHL
Smorball and Beanstalk were designed as part of the Purposeful
Gaming and BHL project, which explores how digital games can make
scanned content more accessible and searchable for cultural
institutions.
Based at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, Missouri,
“Purposeful Gaming and BHL” was established in 2013 through
an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant and
includes partners at Harvard University, Cornell University, and The
New York Botanical Garden.

20. Best Serious Game Award at the
Boston Festival of Indie Games
2015

21. Purposeful Gaming

22. OCR Improvements
German text interpreted by the OCR process as:
“unb auf ben ©elnrgen be6 fublic{)en”

23. AOCR Improvements
Different resulting texts from parsing the phrase:
“und auf den Gebirgen des südlichen Deutschlands”
(“and on the mountains of southern Germany”)
IA OCR OCR 2
Transcriptio
n 1
Transcriptio
n 2
1 unb und und und Ok
2 den ben den den Ok
3 ©elnrgen ©ebirgen Bebirgen Gebirgen X
4 be6 des de5 des Chk
5 fublic{)en fublichen Füdlichen Südlichen X
6 £)eittfc{)(anb6 Deutfchlanbs Deutfchlands
Deutschland
s
X

24. http://miningbiodiversity.comhttp://miningbiodiversity.org/

25. Mining Biodiversity
Mining Biodiversity: Enriching Biodiversity Heritage
with Text Mining and Social Media
One of the international projects that won in the third
round of the 2013 Digging Into Data Challenge
Promote the development of innovative computational
techniques to apply into big data in the humanities and
social sciences
The National Centre for Text Mining (UK)
Missouri Botanical Garden (US)
Dalhousie University's Big Data Analytics Institute (Canada)
Social Media Lab (Canada)

26. MiBIO: Mining Biodiversity
1. Automatic error correction of OCR text errors.
2. Crowdsource annotation of legacy texts with semantic metadata.
3. Adapt text mining techniques to extract terminology, entities and
significant events automatically and to track terminology evolution over
time.
4. Use Interactive visualization techniques to help users manage search
results through next generation browsing capabilities, assisted by a
semantic similarity network of important terms and entities.
5. Design of a social media layer, serving as an environment for diverse
users to interact and collaborate on science, public education,
awareness and outreach.

27. MiBIO: Mining Biodiversity

28. Crowdsource Markup
Display text Species Profile Model category
General/summary TaxonBiology
Geographic range Distribution
Habitat Habitat
Food sources and feeding behavior TrophicStrategy
Physical description (general) Description
Physical description (detailed
morphology)
DiagnosticDescription

29. Thank you
William Ulate
BHL Technical Director
Missouri Botanical Garden
william.ulate@mobot.org
Skype: william_ulate_r