This document discusses the digitization of historical seed and nursery catalogs by several collaborating institutions. It provides background on Ethel Zoe Bailey and her role in curating Cornell University's large collection of these catalogs. The goals of digitization are to make the catalogs accessible to researchers studying early plant introductions and to recreate historical gardens. Several institutions are working together to digitize over 500,000 pages of catalogs hosted in the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The document describes how the catalogs evolved visually over time from text-only broadsides to colorful photographs. It also discusses a crowdsourcing game called Beanstalk that engages the public in improving optical character recognition of scanned texts like the catalogs.

1. Harvesting Heritage:
Seed & Nursery Catalog Digitization,
Discovery & Access
Marty Schlabach
Food & Agriculture Librarian
Mann Library
Cornell University
Cornell University Reunion
Mann Library
June 5, 2015

3. Listings of fruit and vegetables
with descriptions
Amateur's Fruit and Ornamental Trees, York, PA 1867

7. http://bhort.bh.cornell.edu/catalogs.htm

8. Ethel Zoe Bailey
1889-1983
• Curated the seed & nursery collection for 70+
years, 1911-1980s
• Daughter of Liberty Hyde Bailey
• Graduated from Smith College 1911
• Assisted her father with many of his plant
collection trips around the world
• Assisted and coauthored with her father many
of his botany and horticultural publications
• Awarded the George Robert White Medal in
1967 from the Massachusetts Horticultural
Society
• Awarded the Smith College Medal in 1970
• Continued curating the seed & nursery catalog
collection until her death in 1983 at the age of
93
• Lived a long and distinguished career in botany
and horticulture

9. Why were seed & nursery catalogs collected?
How was the collection used?
LH Bailey used the collection in support of his publications, such as:
• Hortus Third
• Manual of Cultivated Plants
• Annals of Horticulture

10. How was it used?
1889 Introduction of
Vick’s Irondequoit Melon,
as found in
Annals of Horticulture, by LH Bailey

11. Why Digitize Seed & Nursery Catalogs?
• Taxonomists
• Discover dates of early introductions of new plants
• Gardeners
• Peruse old catalogs for historical availability and uses of traditional
cultivars of heirloom annuals and perennials
• Museums and botanical gardens
• Recreate historical gardens
• Plant breeders
• Look for descriptions of plants with unique disease and pest resistance
• Historians of art and illustration
• Drawn to the striking representations of flowers, fruit & vegetables
• Historians of printing
• Catalogs documented changes in printing
• Text-only broadsides & pamphlets
• Multipage booklets with engraved illustrations
• Colorful lithographs added
• Photographic illustrations, b&w and later color

12. Collaborative Digitization Effort
• New York Botanical Garden
• LuEsther T. Mertz Library
• 50,000+ catalogs
• National Agriculture Library, USDA
• Henry G. Gilbert Nursery & Seed Trade Catalog Collection
• 200,000+ catalogs
• Missouri Botanical Garden
• Peter H. Raven Library
• Seed exchange lists
• Cornell University
• Cornell University Library
• Liberty Hyde Bailey Hortorium (Plant Specimen Collection)
• Ethel Zoe Bailey Horticultural Catalog Collection
• 130,000+ catalogs

13. Cornell’s Digitization
• Public Domain items only
• i.e. no longer under copyright
• Pre-1923 American, public domain
• Post-1922 American, need research to determine
• Non-US catalogs
• different copyright laws apply
• Began scanning firms that carried grapevines
• Ethel Bailey indexed catalogs by specie & cultivated variety
(cultivar)
• Then scanned firms not held by project partners
• Funding in part provided by
• Institute for Museum & Library Services (IMLS)

14. Seed & Nursery Catalog
Digital Collection
• Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL)
• http://biodiversitylibrary.org
• Collaboration among 20 botanical garden, natural history
museum and academic libraries
• 157,532 volumes
• 45,568,082 pages
• Seed & Nursery Catalog Collection
• http://biodiversitylibrary.org/browse/collection/seedcatalogs
• A subcollection in BHL
• Currently 15,437 volumes and growing
• 769,163 pages
• Combining NAL, NYBG, MBG and Cornell digitized catalogs

19. Historical Development of
American Seed & Nursery Catalogs
• Broadside
• Multi-page, text only
• Engraved & woodcut images added to text
• Hand-colored engravings
• Lithography
• Chromolithography
• Black & White photography
• Color photography
• Today: websites

20. Broadside
One sheet only
Approx 12”x18”
(Prince Nursery, 1793)

21. Text only, multi-page (J. B. Russel’s Catalog of Garden Seeds, 1827)

22. Engravings added to the text (James Vick, 1868)

23. Hand-colored engravings
(D. M. Dewey, Rochester, NY, n.d.)

24. Black & White Lithography, followed by Chromolithography

25. Black & White Photography
(A. Currie & Co, 1923)
Color Photography
(Miss Ella V. Baines, 1928)

26. Garden & Farm
Tools & Equipment
(Mann’s Superior Seeds, 1934)

27. Beekeeping and Dairy Supplies (Mann’s Superior Seeds, 1934)

28. Poultry,
Supplies and Equipment
(Mann’s Superior Seeds, 1934)

30. • National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded to
Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis.
• Partners include Harvard, New York Botanical Garden,
Cornell
• Runs Dec 2013-Nov 2015
• Funded in part by IMLS
Purposeful Gaming and BHL:
engaging the public in improving & enhancing
discovery & access to digital texts

31. BHL Problem Statement:
• Major challenge for digital libraries:
• full-text searching of scanned texts is
significantly hampered by poor output from
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software.
• Historic literature has proven to be particularly
problematic because of its tendency to have
• varying fonts
• varying typesetting
• varying layouts
• ink bleed-through
• foxing
• other physical condition issues

33. • Building an online game to crowdsource the correction of
inaccurate OCR
• Crowdsourcing the transcription of inaccurate OCR and
handwritten texts
• Adding new content types upon which to test the approach
• Seed & Nursery Catalogs & Seed Exchange Lists
• Test OCR correction on this content type
• Crowd-source the transcription when needed
• Field Notebooks,
• Handwritten, OCR virtually impossible
• Crowd-source the transcription
How are we engaging the public in
improving and enhancing the discovery and access to
digital texts in BHL?

34. Beanstalk

35. What happens with the game output?
• Multiple players enter the same character string for a
word, system considers it correct
• String of characters or the correct word is added to the
index
• Made available for searching & improves discoverability
• Games released, June 9, 2015

37. Thanks to my colleagues at:
• Mann Library, Cornell University
(especially Carol Lowe)
• Liberty Hyde Bailey Hortorium, Cornell University
(especially Bob Dirig, Bailey Hortorium, retired
for details of Ethel Zoe Bailey’s life)
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Mertz Library, New York Botanical Garden
• Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Garden
• National Agriculture Library, USDA
• Institute for Museum and Library Services

38. Questions??