Smithsonian Libraries

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Seasons Greetings from the Smithsonian Libraries and the Biodiversity Heritage Library!

 

Rene Martin, Atlas de poche des mammifères de France, de la Suisse romane et de la Belgique. . .
Paris :L. Lhomme,1910.

 

Thanks to collaborators around the world, images like these are available (free and open access!) for future generations.  Please help us continue to grow this great library—we need your support to continue scanning and digitizing legacy literature.  Please make a gift to the BHL today!

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To learn more about the BHL and how it supports important biodiversity research, visit their blog.

Art & Science: Twins Separated at Birth?

As an art librarian, I was expecting to feel a little like a fish out of water at the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s (BHL) Life and Literature conference held at the Field Museum in Chicago.  However, the intrinsic relationship between Art and Science was a recurring theme explored by over 120 attendees from across the globe who gathered to focus on the future of BHL.

Naturgeschichte in Bildern : mit erläuterndem Text / Von Professor Dr. Strack. Lief. 4. (Heft 33-56). Fische.
Düsseldorf :Arnz & Co.,[1819-1826]biodiversitylibrary.org/item/37422

Having scanned over 35 million pages (and counting) of scientific texts documenting life on earth, BHL is transforming how scientists do research.  Within these millions of pages are thousands of illustrations, which served as scientific documentation before the invention of photography.  Paging through these texts, it becomes clear that Art and Science have been inseparable from the beginning, each informing the other as they developed.  Serving as evidence, we find many rare botanical and zoological texts in art libraries, collected for artists and designers who look to nature for inspiration. Now artists can look to BHL in much the same way including new digital advantages such as access to more images from anywhere at anytime.  

BHL is working to make these images more discoverable, especially for non-science communities.  In the meantime, they have gathered thousands of illustrations at BioDivLibrary’s Photostream on Flickr.  Organisms can be browsed by Kingdom such as Birds, Fish, Mammals, etc.  

 

Now Art needs to join in this effort to help connect Art and Science in the world of digital scholarship.  From an Art History perspective, I have long been jealous of Science's ability to develop advanced research tools using the latest technologies, from electronic journals to online databases.  How can the Arts create similar resources, and why do they seem to trail behind?  

Aside from fund raising abilities and the importance society places on different areas of study, I attributed much of this discrepancy to the unique nature of each discipline.  The heavily visual and subjective nature of art can make it difficult to organize.  Artwork cannot be cataloged based on how many legs it has or weather or not it grows hair.  Art requires human interpretation, which is full of gray areas, which makes cataloging art difficult.  

Richard Pyle’s eye-opening talk explaining the complicated world of taxonomy, in a way a non-taxonomist can understand, made me realize how Art and Science actually share similar cataloging challenges.  I had mistakenly thought that life sciences had it easier when it came to organizing information because they have this great taxonomic system introduced by Linnaeus in 1735 that continues to be used by scientists today.   If only art history had such a system, maybe it too could transform research by creating a resource like BHL for art.  But after learning from Pyle how difficult it is to name a fish, identifying an art movement did not seem as daunting anymore!

When naming a fish, one must consider the whole history of names that came before it. As new discoveries are made, fish get named, renamed, and renamed again by different people throughout time.  Trying to keep track of all these names and their histories is an enormous challenge involving several global initiatives.  The Linnaean taxonomy that I was envious of quickly turned into a cataloging nightmare far worse than those caused by Library of Congress’ subject headings.  

I can no longer excuse Art from the world of advanced digital scholarship because it lacks a structured taxonomy, instead, I’m feeling relieved that it does not have one and like a hurdle I thought was there has been removed!

The BHL conference made it very clear that by creating stronger connections between Art and Science through linked data and other emerging technologies we can open new doors just as scientific illustrations paved the path for new discoveries centuries ago.

 

http://collection.cooperhewitt.org/view/objects/asitem/id/181626

Don't miss out on Life & Lit!

The Biodiversity Heritage Library will host a twoday conference titled “Life and Literature” Nov. 14 and 15 at the Field Museum in Chicago. The conference will unite librarians, biologists, computer scientists, publishers and students to set the agenda for biodiversity literature digitizing and its networked environment for the next five years.

 

Momotus lessonii, from Iconographie ornithologique, via BHL's Flickr stream.

 

“Life and Literature” seeks to engage current and future constituencies concerned with biodiversity literature. Sessions will discuss the interoperability of major biodiversity and digital library programs, continued integration of digitized literature within biodiversity databases and publishing models for legacy scientific literature.

Guest lecturers include Richard Pyle and George Dyson. Pyle, a zoologist at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, is an expert of the taxonomy and biogeography of coralreef fishes. He has written more than 100 scientific articles and has been featured in several documentary films. Dyson is a scientific historian of technology whose interests include the development of the Aleut kayak (Baidarka, 1986), the evolution of digital computing and telecommunications (Darwin Among the Machines, 1997) and the exploration of space (Project Orion, 2002).

Headquartered at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, the Biodiversity Heritage Library is the literature digitization component of the Encyclopedia of Life, a global effort to document all 1.8 million named species of animals, plants and other forms of life on Earth. BHL is a consortium of 12 major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries and research institutions. Its goal is to contribute to the global “biodiversity commons” by digitizing and aggregating the resources housed within each of the participating institutions, providing free and open access to the legacy literature that underpins the work of the natural science community.

Many Smithsonian Libraries staff members will be attending this event. If you're unable to make it to Chicago, look for their notes from the conference on our blog in late November! You can also follow the conference on Twitter, Facebook and Lanyrd .

Looking back at IFLA conference

Becky Morin (User Services Librarian, California Academy of Sciences) and I attended the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) World Library and Information Congress in Puerto Rico from August 13-16.

L-R: Becky Morin and Bianca Crowley

Our paper, Heeding the Call: User Feedback Management and the Digital Library, written in collaboration with Smithsonian Institution Libraries colleagues Grace Costantino (Digital Collections Librarian) and Erin Thomas (Digital Collections Librarian), won the De Gruyter Saur / IFLA Research Paper Award complete with a €1,000 prize and an invitation to the IFLA President's lunch.

An annual conference attracting over 3,500 attendees from over 120 countries, and with translation services in the 7 official IFLA languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Russian and Spanish), the event feels like a library conference mixed with a UN meeting. The conference kicked off on Sunday August 14 with a warm welcome from prominent Puerto Rican professor, humanist, and historian, Dr. Fernando Picó.

Later that day Becky and I had the esteemed opportunity to accept the award on behalf of our colleagues at the IFLA President's lunch where we rubbed shoulders with some big names in the international library community, including Ellen Tise, (IFLA President), Patrice Landry (Responsable Indexation matières, Bibliothèque nationale suisse BN), Daniel J. Caron (Librarian and Archivist of Canada), our very own Nancy Gwinn, and many others.

Over the course of Monday and Tuesday, we attended a variety of conference sessions, notably sessions on: Building Stronger Library Associations, Challenges and Changing Roles of Science and Technology Libraries, and Winds of Change: a taxonomy of clouds for libraries. Not wanting to miss an opportunity to share about the Biodiversity Heritage Library while attending conference sessions, we donned giant, full-color, buttons with the phrase "Ask Me About BHL". The buttons worked out really well as a fun ice-breaker for networking with librarians from all over the world. Especially over the OCLC Reception on Monday night, Becky and I had the chance to talk up BHL with a variety of new faces in the buffet line. That evening we enjoyed our dinner and watched professional dancers showcase their Salsa and Merengue skills with Rebecca Graham (Harvard University) and the Libraries' Mary Augusta Thomas. I am already scheming about button ideas for my next conference; buttons with BHL QR codes are coming next!

In addition, we met with Dr. Alice Keller (Editorial Director, Library and Information Science & History, De Gruyter Saur) & Ingeborg Verheul (Communications and Services Director, IFLA) to discuss the publication of the award-winning paper. Decided just recently, the paper will be featured in an upcoming De Gruyter publication, stay tuned. My colleagues and I are honored to have our paper published and feel very privileged to have had the opportunity to work together to deliver a paper that really captures the heart of how BHL librarians work together to accomplish the day-to-day tasks that are digitizing nearly 35 million pages of biodiversity content and making it available for free online.

—Bianca Crowley, Biodiversity Heritage Library Collections Coordinator