This was a talk for the St Louis Chapter of Special Libraries Association about library-related projects going on in the Center for Biodiversity Informatics at Missouri Botanical Garden

1. Projects at
Center for Biodiversity Informatics
Missouri Botanical Garden
Trish Rose-Sandler
Data Projects Coordinator
SLA St Louis Chapter meeting St Louis MO March 29 2014

3. 3 projects I’ll cover:
• Art of Life
• Purposeful Gaming and BHL
• Mining Biodiversity

4. What is BHL?
• A consortium of natural history, botanical libraries and
research institutions
• An open access digital library for historic biodiversity
literature
• An open data repository of taxonomic names and
bibliographic information

5. 16 BHL Member Institutions as of March 2014
• American Museum of Natural History
• California Academy of Sciences Library
• Cornell University Library
• Harvard University Botany Libraries
• Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology
• Library of Congress
• Marine Biological Laboratory / Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Library
• Missouri Botanical Garden Library
• National Library Board (Singapore)
• Natural History Museum, London
• The New York Botanical Garden
• Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
• Smithsonian Institution Libraries
• United States Geological Survey Libraries
• Washington University St Louis
• University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

6. BHL
Global

9. BHL Scientific Names

12. What is Art of Life?
• Full title - The Art of Life: Data Mining and
Crowdsourcing the Identification and Description
of Natural History Illustrations from the
Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL)
• Grant given to Missouri Botanical Garden in St
Louis. Partners :Indianapolis Museum of Art,
University of Colorado, Boulder
• Funded by National Endowment for the
Humanities
• Runs May 2012-April 2014 (extended 1 yr til April
15)

13. BHL Problem statement
– users want access to images, access to images is
limited
– How to broaden the audiences for BHL content?

15. 5 Primary Objectives of Art of Life
Objective 1: Define an appropriate metadata schema for natural history
illustrations
Objective 2: Build software tools to automatically identify illustrations in the
BHL corpus
Objective 3: Enhance existing tools to enable the initial sorting, viewing, and
editing of these identified visual resources.
Objective 4: Integrate tagging applications to enable a community of users to
edit descriptive metadata for the illustrations
Objective 5: Integrate the descriptive metadata generated by users back into
BHL portal both for access and preservation

17. What is Purposeful Gaming and BHL?
• Full title - Purposeful gaming and BHL: engaging the public in
improving and enhancing access to digital texts
• National Leadership Grant for Libraries given to Missouri
Botanical Garden in St Louis.
• Partners include Harvard, Cornell, New York Botanical Garden
• Funded by IMLS
• Runs Dec 2013-Nov 2015

18. BHL Problem statement
– major challenge for digital libraries: full-text searching of
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, typesetting, and layouts that make it difficult
to accurately render

19. Sample of poor OCR output from an 18th century publication.
This page is from Linneaus' Species Plantarum published in 1753
An image of the original text is on the left. The OCR is on the rightthe right

20. A sample of poor OCR output from a hand written text. This page is
from the Diaries of William Brewster, 1865-1919

21. 8 primary objectives of Purposeful Gaming and BHL
1) digitizing horticultural catalogs
2) transcribing field notebooks and horticultural catalogs
3) building a technical framework for management of digital
text outputs
4) comparing digital outputs for accuracy
5) developing and deploying a game
6) evaluating accuracy scores from the game against
ground truth pages
7) generating an error matrix for clean-up
8) producing a report and disseminating findings.

22. Like reCaptcha …….

23. …..but a lot more fun!

24. What is Mining Biodiversity?
• Full title – Mining Biodiversity: Enriching Biodiversity Heritage with Text
Mining and Social Media
• 3 separate grants given to The National Centre for Text Mining, University of
Manchester (UK), Missouri Botanical Garden (USA); Dalhousie University’s Big
Data Analytics Institute (Canada) and Social Media Lab (Canada)
• Mining Biodiversity is one of the projects that won in the third round of the
transatlantic Digging Into Data Challenge, a competition aiming to promote the
development of innovative computational techniques that can be applied to
big data in the humanities and social sciences.
• Runs March 2014- Sept 2015

25. Goals
• enriching a large-scale library, i.e., the BHL, via innovative
application of text mining techniques to produce semantic metadata
and a term inventory,
• providing improved access to biodiversity-related digital artifacts via
an enhanced search engine and visualisation of results, and
• stimulating increased collaboration, interaction and sharing of
information amongst BHL users via the social media environment.

26. http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Art+of+Life
http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Purposeful+Gaming
http://miningbiodiversity.org/
Contact: Trish Rose-Sandler
trish.rose-sandler@mobot.org
For more info and to track progress of
these projects