BHL Update

July 29, 2014

HighlightsMembershipMajor ProjectsArt of LifeNew GrantsField Book ProjectBHL GrowthEOL Collaboration

Topics

Teamed with EOL for Smithsonian Associates program on digital volunteerism Machine-tagging images in BHL’s Flickr

Photostream

Cropping & rating images

Exploring iNaturalist platform

BHL and SIL co-curated “Once There Were Billions: Vanished Birds of North America” in Natural History Museum

Rehired Grace Costantino as Community/Outreach Manager

Applied for Associate member status in GBIF

Highlights

Bouchout Declaration Became a charter signatory of the Bouchout

Declaration for Open Biodiversity Management

Signatories “promote free and open access to data and information about biodiversity by people and computers and to bring about an inclusive and shared knowledge management and infrastructure that will our society to respond more effectively to challenges of the present and future.”

New BHL affiliates LA County Natural History Museum

Chicago Botanical Garden

BHL Europe now under umbrella of CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities)

BHL Africa U. of Pretoria installed IA Scribe machine – now

digitizing

NHM Kenya installing Macaw software on current equipment

BHL Singapore attending all meetings, purchased new digital equipment

Member Highlights

Art of Life -- NEH

Purposeful Gaming -- IMLS

Mining Biodiversity – Digging into Data

Global Names Project – NSF – completed Provided means for accommodating and searching

articles

Made possible to include references to third-party systems

Major Projects

Millions of natural history illustrations

Very few have metadata that describe their content or where they are in the book

Image Searching Challenges in BHL

Only pretty pictures

Still too manual

Many illustra-tions not included

BHL and Flickr—90,000 images

o Full title - The Art of Life: Data Mining and Crowdsourcing the Identification and Description of Natural History Illustrations from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL)

o Grant given to Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis MO USA

o Funded by National Endowment for the Humanities

o Runs May 2012-April 2015

Art of Life?

How to identify illustrations?

Algorithms to automate the identification of illustrations tested

Picture blocks (87-88% effective)

Contrast (87-88% effective)

Color (ineffective)

Compression (ineffective)

Macaw interface for classifying pages identified by algorithms

FlickrWikimediaCommons

Crowdsourcing description of illustrations

Running algorithms across BHL corpus

1.5 million pages processed; 300,000 pages with images;

Estimate will be 15% of corpus--pages with images

Classifying results – 78,000 pages so far

Testing bulk upload to Wikimedia Commons

Testing extraction of metadata from tool

BHL architecture modified and ready to store and preserve newly created metadata

Schema to be made public

Algorithms & tools on github

Art of Life Status

9 Smithsonian field notebooks added to BHL

Diaries of David Crockett Graham

Photo albums from Harriman Alaska Expedition, 1899

62 other field notes in BHL

Field Book Project

BHL Growth44,139,661 pages scanned140,487 items in BHLTOTAL NAMES IN BHL:

155,012,967TOTAL PERMISSIONS

AGREEMENTS: 357

BHL Pages linking to EOL species pages: 16,496,376 (37% increase)

EOL Species pages linking to BHL articles: 1,177,510 (28% increase)

Total names in BHL: 155,012,967

EOL Collaboration

Richard Naples, SILMartin Kalfatovic, SILTrish Rose-Sandler, Mo BotanicalConnie Rinaldo, MCZ Harvard

EOL Staff and Executive Committee

Thank yous

QUESTIONS?