Martin R. Kalfatovic

The Biodiversity Heritage Library: Advancing Metadata Practices in a Collaborative Digital Library

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is an open access digital library of taxonomic literature, forming a single point of access to this collection for use by a worldwide audience of professional taxonomists, as well as “citizen scientists.” A successful mass-scanning digitization program, one that creates functional and findable digital objects, requires thoughtful metadata work flow that parallels the work flow of the physical items from shelf to scanner. This article examines the needs of users of taxonomic literature, specifically in relation to the transformation of traditional library material to digital form. It details the issues that arise in determining scanning priorities, avoiding duplication of scanning across the founding 12 natural history and botanical garden library collections, and the problems related to the complexity of serials, monographs, and series. Highlighted are the tools, procedures, and methodology for addressing the details of a mass-scanning operation. Specifically, keeping a steady flow of material, creation of page level metadata, and building services on top of data and metadata that meet the needs of the targeted communities. The replication of the BHL model across a number of related projects in China, Brazil, and Australia are documented as evidence of the success of the BHL mass-scanning project plan.

What Is Open

There is a broad difference of opinion among the many stakeholders in scholarly publishing about how to precisely define open access publishing. Are “open access” and “open data” what we mean by open? Does “open” mean anything else? Does it mean “to make available,” or “to make freely available in a particular format?” Is a clearer definition needed (or maybe just better education on the current definition)? Why or why not? At present, some stakeholders see public access as being an acceptable stopping point in the move toward open access. Others see “open” as requiring free and immediate access with articles being available in CC-BY format. The range of opinions between these extremes is vast. How should these differences be decided? Who should decide? Is it possible to make binding recommendations (and how)? Is consensus necessary? What are the consequences of the lack of consensus?

Unlocking Index Animalium: From paper slips to bytes and bits.

Abstract In 1996 Smithsonian Libraries (SIL) embarked on the digitization of its collections. By 1999, a full-scale digitization center was in place and rare volumes from the natural history collections, often of high illustrative value, were the focus for the first years of the program. The resulting beautiful books made available for online display were successful to a certain extent, but it soon became clear that the data locked within the texts needed to be converted to more usable and re-purposable form via digitization methods that went beyond simple page imaging and included text conversion elements. Library staff met with researchers from the taxonomic community to understand their path to the literature and identified tools (indexes and bibliographies) used to connect to the library holdings. The traditional library metadata describing the titles, which made them easily retrievable from the shelves of libraries, was not meeting the needs of the researcher looking for more detailed and granular data within the texts. The result was to identify proper print tools that could potential assist researchers in digital form. This paper outlines the project undertaken to convert Charles Davies Sherborn’s Index Animalium into a tool to connect researchers to the library holdings: from a print index to a database to eventually a dataset. Sherborn’s microcitation of a species name and his bibliographies help bridge the gap between taxonomist and literature holdings of libraries. In 2004, SIL received funding from the Smithsonian’s Atherton Seidell Endowment to create an online version of Sherborn’s Index Animalium. The initial project was to digitize the page images and re-key the data into a simple data structure. As the project evolved, a more complex database was developed which enabled quality field searching to retrieve species names and to search the bibliography. Problems with inconsistent abbreviations and styling of his bibliographies made the parsing of the data difficult. Coinciding with the development of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) in 2005, it became obvious there was a need to integrate the database converted Index Animalium, BHL’s scanned taxonomic literature, and taxonomic intelligence (the algorithmic identification of binomial, Latinate name-strings). The challenges of working with legacy taxonomic citation, computer matching algorithms, and making connections have brought us to today’s goal of making Sherborn available and linked to other datasets. Partnering with others to allow machine-to-machine communications the data is being examined for possible transformation into RDF markup and meeting the standards of Linked Open Data. SIL staff have partnered with Thomson Reuters and the Global Names Initiative to further enhance the Index Animalium data set. Thomson Reuters’ staff is now working on integrating the species microcitation and species name in the ION : Index to Organism Names project; Richard Pyle (The Bishop Museum) is also working on further parsing of the text. The Index Animalium collaborative project’s ultimate goal is to successful have researchers go seamlessly from the species name in either ION or the scanned pages of Index Animalium to the digitized original description in BHL - connecting taxonomic researchers to original authored species descriptions with just a click.

How Did BHL Get to Big Data

With 89.9 terabytes of data spanning over 500 years of data collection, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is an important galaxy in the universe of biodiversity data. Embedded in those 89.9 terabytes are over 174 million species name occurrences and a currently unknown number of species occurrences, descriptions, identified traits, and related data--all locked in the over 500 years of data captured in the BHL. Growth of BHL partnerships in the past year and other key achievements, tools, and services will be covered. BHL collaborations with other biodiversity organizations (including GBIF and EOL) as well as specific projects such as BHLs Flickr stream will be covered. The Biodiversity Heritage Library has grown to be an important part of the infrastructure of biodiversity. In an attempt to solve the literature component of the taxonomic impediment, the BHL continues to provide access to legacy print publications and make this data widely available for reuse in collections support systems. Recognizing the importance of archival materials, specifically field notes, the BHL has moved to increase coverage of these materials through ongoing projects. Additionally, the BHL has actively worked on a variety of social media platforms. This session will include a brief update on BHL activities since that 2016 TDWG. The final section of this presentation will be a guided discussion of desideratum and enhancements TDWG participants see as important for BHL.

Report from the "What Is Open?" Workgroup

The scholarly community’s current definition of “open” captures only some of the attributes of openness that exist across different publishing models and content types. Open is not an end in itself, but a means for achieving the most effective dissemination of scholarship and research. We suggest that the different attributes of open exist along a broad spectrum and propose an alternative way of describing and evaluating openness based on four attributes: discoverable, accessible, reusable, and transparent. These four attributes of openness, taken together, form the draft “DART Framework for Open Access.” This framework can be applied to both research artifacts as well as research processes. We welcome input from the broader scholarly community about this framework. OSI2016 workgroup question There is a broad difference of opinion among the many stakeholders in scholarly publishing about how to precisely define open access publishing. Are “open access” and “open data” what we mean by open? Does “open” mean anything else? Does it mean “to make available,” or “to make freely available in a particular format?” Is a clearer definition needed (or maybe just better education on the current definition)? Why or why not? At present, some stakeholders see public access as being an acceptable stopping point in the move toward open access. Others see “open” as requiring free and immediate access with articles being available in CC-BY format. The range of opinions between these extremes is vast. How should these differences be decided? Who should decide? Is it possible to make binding recommendations (and how)? Is consensus necessary? What are the consequences of the lack of consensus?

Collaboration and communication tools used by the biodiversity heritage library

Through the application of multiple strategies and tools, the Biodiversity Heritage Library has created an effective and collaborative multi-institutional virtual organization. The purpose of this paper is to explore the communication and collaboration strategies used by the BHL to create, maintain, and provide open access to its corpus of biodiversity literature. BHL, in its seventh year, is a mature service and no longer a pilot project. Largely driven from the ground up, and without any institutional mandate, the BHL has successfully and organically fostered an organizational model that has encouraged innovation, user engagement, and global expansion.

Ambitious new CD-ROM on endangered and extinct species

(This article is a US Government work and, as such, is in the public domain in the United States of America.)