Fern collection analysis

Back to Collection Analysis

This page is dedicated to the collections analysis work done by Smithsonian Librarians Jacqueline Chapman and Robin Everly, focused on taxonomic names and bibliographies.

*

Methods and Outcome Exploration - impact on the field (Fall 2016)
by Jacqueline Chapman

Poster Title: On Their Terms: Leveraging Biological Taxonomy for a User-Centric Collection Analysis of a Consortial Digital Library

Poster Abstract:
http://libraryassessment.org/schedule/index.shtml
(download program abstracts document to view)

Jackie's poster:
ChapmanJE_LACPoster.pdf


*

Fern (and Bird) Taxonomic Name Project (Summer 2016)
by Jacqueline Chapman and SI Intern Rebecca Greenstein

Becca's end of internship blog post for SIL:
https://blog.library.si.edu/2016/08/every-one-knows-bird/#.WIe7s3p0uVM

Becca's end of internship blog post for BHL:
http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2016/08/hows-your-fern-and-bird-coverage-bhl.html

You can see the scanning requests in Gemini by searching for keywords "GreensteinR@si.edu AND fern" (Jackie has a workspace for this, where she is tracking, can share if desired). Becca also worked in the spreadsheet that Robin worked in the previous year - see below.

*

Fern Taxonomic Name Project (Spring 2015)
By: Jacqueline Chapman and Robin Everly

Poster Title: Assessing the taxonomic and bibliographic coverage of pteridological literature in the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Jackie and Robin's poster (written and designed for a non-librarian audience):
Fern Poster FINAL.pdf

Poster was designed to be presented at SBS, and was ultimately presented at TDWG as well.

Jackie and Robin's poster abstract for SBS (Jackie & Robin presented):
http://botany.si.edu/events/sbsarchives/sbs2015/
(need to download the proceedings - its the first poster listed)

Jackie and Robin's poster abstract for TDWG (Jackie presented):
https://mbgserv18.mobot.org/ocs/index.php/tdwg/2015/paper/view/841

The Google spreadsheet for ferns:
Fern bibliography
(This was the basis for Robin's project in 2015. Becca used this spreadsheet also for her project - there is a duplicate copy in the second tab in the same spreadsheet, that shows Becca's work.)

Notes from Aug 10, 2015 Collections Committee call
Conference at SI where Jackie/Robin wanted to interact with potential/actual BHL users ==> had to put a poster together and get some research done!
Robin used Fern Bibliography for English language books pre-1900, not journals
Trying to estimate how well
authors were thorough on their presentation of fern literature for the scope re: rare, reprints, editions, &etc. ==> very comprehensive for scope
Had 5-6 weeks to do the work
Spreadsheet showed that out of about 302 titles...72 in BHL, 102 not in BHL and not held by BHL partners, 128 not in BHL but available by BHL partners
24% of books from bibliography actually in BHL...
Robin had to rekey everything from bibliography into spreadsheet!
What would it look like taxonomically? Would have have most of the fern species represented?
Jackie had to research 4 different classes of Pterodites - used Catalog of Life (based on World Ferns) to download class names lists - and focused on genus
downloaded all BHL data (yes! all the data)
Jackie taught herself Python to crunch the BHL data against the controlled vocab provided by Catalog of Life
Polypodium most hits, 306 genus names
None of the missing names, only 10, are from pre-1923 literature
93% of pterodite genera represented in BHL
Permissions really helped with taxonomic coverage
Data can tell us some things - next step = talking to subject experts to analyze data to understand more about what the data is telling us; is the distribution of genera correlated to taxonomic makeup
This kind of analysis could really be extended to other groups of organisms
Each group of organisms has its own idiosyncrasies influencing the literature
CR: Would be great to do this for other groups if we can find good bibliographies, also goes to show how important it is to have current materials
Jackie reports that taxonomic part is fast b/c the script is ready to go (thanks Jackie!)
But the hard, time-intensive work is putting the bibliography together
JJ: maybe If we could digitize the bibliography, maybe we could parse the entries automatically using Google refine or other coding
Robin: didn't mind rekeying the bibliography b/c really helped with subject specialty knowledge, this book would have been impossible to automatically parse
Users impressed that librarians were invested in the literature based on the scope of the conference
Originally Robin/Jackie thought about adding many more fields to spreadsheet such as whether or not the book had a TL2 number, &etc.
...50 hours estimate to rekey bibliography - 302 books in bibliography total
This was 1st time in 11 years that conference was held. SI has one of largest fern collections. Dept of Botany happy to see active librarian at conference
Robin could make suggestions for streamlining bibliography creation for BHL analysis going forward
Jackie continuing to learn python, genus level is nice level of granularity for now
Google docs was a good way to work collaboratively
SIL was working on developing TL2 as a parsed bibliography but Joel hasn't had time to address