Biodiversity Heritage Library: An Effective local-global collaboration
Bhl mashupfor australiameeting
1. Biodiversity Heritage Library
Mashup: Grants & Social Media
Biodiversity Heritage Library*
*Thanks to Grace Costantino, Trish-Rose Sandler & William Ulate for sharing their work.
2. Grants
• Connecting Content: A Collaboration to Link Field
Notes & Published Literature
• The Art of Life: Data Mining&Crowdsourcing the
Identification&Description of Natural History
Illustrations from the Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Purposeful Gaming & BHL: engaging the public in
improving & enhancing access to digital texts
• Digging into Data: Mining Biodiversity Project
3. Connecting Content: A Collaboration to Link
Field Notes & Published Literature
• Digitize field notes & specimens (multiple institutions,
completed)
• Expose images on BHL portal
(http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/search?searchTerm
=connecting+content#/titles
• Link to specimens (some in-house; GBIF in process)
• Link to published literature (in process)
• Link to user community via
inaturalisthttps://www.inaturalist.org/ (in process)
• California Academy of Sciences leads the grant
http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2013/05/documenting-scientific-knowledge-one.html
5. The Art of Life
Thanks to Trish-Rose Sandler
• BHL Problem statement–users want access to
images, access to images is limited–How to
broaden the audiences for BHL content?
• Grant from the National Endowment for the
Humanities, USA to the Missouri Botanical
Garden May 2012-April 2014
6. Art of Life Primary Objectives & Status
• Define appropriate metadata schema for natural
history illustrations (http://tinyurl.com/9hm7nsb) VRA
Core with elements from Darwin Core
• Build software tools to automatically identify
illustrations in the BHL corpus: algorithms complete,
running them now
• Enhance existing tools to enable sorting & editing of
identified illustrations (in process)
• Integrate tagging applications so that users can edit
descriptive metadata (in process)
• Integrate user-generated metadata into the BHL portal
8. Purposeful Gaming & BHL
MOBOT leads; start Dec. 2013
• Test new means of crowdsourcing to support the
enhancement of content in BHL
• Test digital games as a tool for improving
OCR/transcription of handwritten & complex text
(example): http://tinyurl.com/kzhvc9y
• Improve access to content
• Extend limited staff resources
• Exposure of content to new potential users
Thanks to Trish-Rose Sandler & William Ulate
9.
10.
11. Digging into Data: Mining Biodiversity
http://tinyurl.com/knzckpm
• International team with multiple funders: Missouri
Botanical Garden is a team member
• Transform BHL into a next-generation social digital
library: efficient access & sharing
• Foster interdisciplinary, collaborative discussion of
legacy literature worldwide through social media
• Raise awareness of biodiversity changes through time
• Integration of text mining, visualization,
crowdsourcing& social media= semantic search for BHL
link content from partner sites to a vibrant user community in a compelling manner, that the delivery for this content would be created under an open source and open access model, and that we hoped to make the application sustainable from a technology standpoint with in a thriving user community. a partnership with iNaturalist which will utilize a mobile phone platform to integrate current user location data with geolocated species occurrence records in GBIF, and connect users to related field observations and published literature in BHL
VRA core designed for artwork
Our current method of addressing image discovery
Multiple institutions: also Harvard, Cornell and NYBG; on shoulders of digital koot http://www.digitalkoot.fi/
With Umanchester Text mining centreSocial media lab Dalhousie Mobot All working on mining biodiversity project.
images are very popular , particularly among artists and others not so interested in the scientific parts of BHL
Robust social media presence:3319 twitter followers7008 facebook followers2568 flickr followersWith orange trendline1,424,773 visits to BHL in 201336,928 visits from social media, ours and others (Down from 42,000+ visits from social media in 2012)Of those, 13,400 visits from BHL’s blog, facebook, and twitter in 2013From Jan to Dec, we saw an 8% decline in total visits to BHL websiteReferals from these three social media platforms (Facebook, blog, and flickr) saw a decline of 14% from Jan to Dec.The decline in visits from social media has a direct correlation to a decline in social media content being generated. At SIL alone, temporarily down two staff members who made contributions to social media efforts. Interestingly,SinaWeibo directed 1,152 visits. SinaWeibo is a chinesemicroblogging platform.Of those, 13,400 visits from BHL’s blog, facebook, and twitter in 2013From Jan to Dec, we saw an 8% decline in total visits to BHL websiteReferals from these three social media platforms (Facebook, blog, and flickr) saw a decline of 14% from Jan to Dec.The decline in visits from social media has a direct correlation to a decline in social media content being generated. At SIL alone, temporarily down two staff members who made contributions to social media efforts. Interestingly,SinaWeibo directed 1,152 visits. SinaWeibo is a chinesemicroblogging platform.
Without trend line1,424,773 visits to BHL in 201336,928 visits from social media, ours and others (Down from 42,000+ visits from social media in 2012)Of those, 13,400 visits from BHL’s blog, facebook, and twitter in 2013From Jan to Dec, we saw an 8% decline in total visits to BHL websiteReferals from these three social media platforms (Facebook, blog, and flickr) saw a decline of 14% from Jan to Dec.The decline in visits from social media has a direct correlation to a decline in social media content being generated. At SIL alone, temporarily down two staff members who made contributions to social media efforts. Interestingly,SinaWeibo directed 1,152 visits. SinaWeibo is a chinesemicroblogging platform.
Blue line – steep drop off in November marks Gilbert’s departure and lack of dedicated staff to Flickr efforts. We start to see some work being done by others, I believe this is Joe and also some at Field. SIL will also be bringing on a volunteer soon.Red line – increase in views despite drop off in new content.Green – decline in visits to website reflects general decline in images added but at a less dramatic rate of decline87641 photosIt is also worth noting that as of Jan 1, there are 3,314 of BHL’s flickr images included in EOL: http://eol.org/collections/53002/