Smithsonian Libraries

Some last minute resolutions

This time of year is full of lists -- to-dos and "best of"s and, of course, resolutions. If you've found yourself a little lacking in the resolution-making department this year, we offer a few suggestions:

 

	Dust off that old sewing machine in Granny's basement and learn more about it in our collection of Sewing Machine Trade Literature.
	Do good and help preserve a literary treasure by adopting a book.
	Find gorgeous graphic inspiration for all sorts of creative projects in our digitized copy of the Japanese design book, Shin bijutsukai
	Save money while fueling your new eReader with our handy list of free resources.
	Finally identify that mysterious berry in your backyard by using LeafSnap and then searching for more about the species in the Biodiversity Heritage Library
	Benefit from SI's mission to increase and diffuse knowledge by browsing over 10,000 museum and staff publications freely available in the Smithsonian Digital Repository.

What are your resolutions for the new year? Any that are book or library related? We'd love to know in the comments. Whatever you do in the coming year, we hope it is filled with happiness! Happy New Year from the Smithsonian Institution Libraries!

Celebrating the Life and Contributions of Charles Davies Sherborn

On October 28, 2011, NHM, London, in collaboration with the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, the Society for the History of Natural History and others, hosted a symposium, "Anchoring Biodiversity Information: From Sherborn to the 21st century and beyond,” honoring the 150^th anniversary of the birth of Charles Davies Sherborn. Sherborn, 1861-1942, played a critical role in the biodiversity world by being the first to successfully index every living or extinct animal discovered and documented between 1758 and 1850. His greatest work, Index Animalium, took over 43 years to complete but is still referred to by taxonomist around the world. The one-day event, held at the Flett Theatre at the Natural History Museum, London, celebrated the incredible achievements of Sherborn and the ramifications for taxonomic research yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

 

 

 

The Smithsonian Libraries presented at the symposium with Suzanne Pilsk, metadata librarian, giving a talk and Grace Costantino (Digital Collections Librarian for BHL) and Leslie Overstreet (Curator of the Joseph F. Cullman 3^rd Library at SIL) presenting a poster.

 

 

 

Unlocking indexanimaliumstatic

View more presentations from SCPilsk

 

SIL’s Suzanne Pilsk explained the role Smithsonian Libraries has played in bringing the critical work Index Animalium out of the library and off the page with a talk titled “Unlocking the Index Animalium: From paper slips to bytes and bits” (pictured above). Pilsk represented the work done to date by SIL staff, interns and volunteers to create an online version of the work. Smithsonian Libraries’ goal was to provide better access to the Index than was previously available and connect the researcher to the level of information needed. Over the span of years, staff has evolved the project from the initial vision of discovering where the text was located within the library walls, to linking to the scanned text via BHL.

The poster presented by Grace Costantino and Leslie Overstreet, entitled “Online Synergy: Sherborn’s Index Animalium and the Biodiversity Heritage Library,” delved into the link between SIL’s online version of Index Animalium and the digitized volumes within BHL. SIL’s online version of the Index Animalium allows researchers to search the entire multi-volume work by name, epithet, or other keyword. With the citation thus provided, researchers can then access the cited text itself on BHL, finding not only the species citation but, in many cases, remarkable illustrations as well.

 

 

 

The talks and posters from the symposium can be viewed here, and to find out more about the incredible life of Charles Davies Sherborn, take a look at the feature on him and the symposium in The Telegraph. You can also view photos from the event on Flickr.

— Suzanne Pilsk and Grace Costantino

Spring Internship Opportunities!

Do you know an undergrad or graduate student studying library science, art or history? We are looking for a few good candidates to fill intern positions this spring! Both of these internships are unpaid but may be performed full or part time. Although the Smithsonian itself can not award credit for internships, but we are happy to work with academic institutions to do so. For more information about the benefits of interning at the Smithsonian, click here!  

 

Here are the two positions currently available:

Review of reference materials in History and Culture branch libraries

This project is to assist reference librarians in the History and Culture branches in reviewing their reference collections. The process involves reviewing all library reference or ready-reference titles, with the aim of withdrawing any titles that are either redundant, available online for free or low cost, or under-used by museum staff. The intern would complete the paperwork, pack the boxes, and arrange for shipment. This topic may not often be discussed in library school.  The intern would discuss the process and rationale with reference librarians and technicians and the criteria for weeding and learn how librarians make decisions to weed and cultivate a paper and online collection in a special library setting.

This internship would be either part or full time and located in various branches, including the National Air and Space Museum and the National Museum of American History. Desirable candidates will have an understanding of the selection and de-accessioning process for reference materials (collection development) . Multiple interns may be chosen. Application deadline is January 20, 2012.

 

Hirshhorn Museum Library Collections Care

This internship is available either full time or part time to students with a background in art history and foreign langauages and a keen attention to detail. It entails searching databases for specific titles in the HMSG collection and transferring items to off site storage if necessary. Application deadline is January 20th, 2012.

 

For more information, including detailed application instructions, please visit our webpage here.

Announcing TL-2 Online

The Smithsonian Libraries is pleased to announce that the online version of Taxonomic Literature II, or TL-2, is now online on the Libraries' website. We are calling this TL-2 Online.

What is TL-2?

TL-2 is an essential tool for Botany research that includes botanists and their publications from 1753 to the present. Comprising fifteen volumes, seven original and eight supplemental, Tl-2 is organized alphabetically by author and includes some biographical information about each author.  The main content for the author entries is the publications that he or she has written. TL-2 was constructed such that each author is assigned a unique abbreviation and each publication a unique number. There are nearly 10,000 authors and over 37,000 publications in TL-2 and the entire set of data is cross-referenced in the two indexes in each of the fifteen volumes.

To put it simply, TL-2 is a database published in the form of a book. Now that the Libraries, with generous permission from the publisher, has digitized and placed the content online the door has been opened to utilize the data from TL-2 in new ways, some of which we haven't even imagined yet. 

What can I do with TL-2?

Currently the website allows you to search TL-2 Online either via a simple keyword search, or a more advanced search on several fields including logical AND and OR operators. Additionally, all volumes of TL-2 may be read online using a simple page-turning application. Finally, in addition to the scan of the page, all pages that contain searchable data are presented with the corrected OCR text that was created during the digitization process. 

Our goal was to construct TL-2 Online using modern web development techniques to minimize page refreshes in order to offer a better experience for readers. The result is that viewing search results and reading the volumes online is very, very fast. 

The data used to create TL-2 Online is also available for download and use by other people and organizations. The download file contains the full corrected text as well as the XML version of the parsed data. Due to the fact that we continue to work on the data and plan to do additional parsing, this data is subject to change and a version number and last modified date are provided for reference.

What else do you have planned?

We're very glad you asked that! As part of the Libraries' website redesign, TL-2 Online will be one of the first components of the new Digital Library that to be presented entirely as Linked Open Data (LOD). Overall, LOD will be integral to the entire Digital Library, but TL-2 will be the first data set that we make available in that manner. The Smithsonian Libraries will aims to become the permanent home for TL-2 and the authority for TL-2 Linked Open Data identifiers. Although LOD is not directly visible to visitors to our site, making it available allows other computers and software to more easily reuse and query the data without extensive programming.

We also plan to continue parsing the data inside TL-2 in order to provide new avenues for using and analyzing the data. Expect the TL-2 Online website to expand to include new downloadable data and new features when the time comes. For example, may botanists contributed specimens to herbaria (libraries of plant specimens) around the world. We would like to present that data in a searchable fashion on the site when the data is ready.

Lastly, a note: Since TL-2 Online was digitized from a printed work, there are bound to be errors in the OCR and places where the parsing was not quite accurate. Although we have minimized many these, there may still be some that exist. Please be patient and feel free to contact us if you'd like to bring anything to our attention.

We hope that botanists around the world continue to use TL-2 and that they find our new online offering even easier to use than the printed work.