Life and Literature Poster Session

Poster Sessions for Life and Literature

Thank you for submitting a poster session for the Life and Literature conference (Chicago, IL, 14-15 November 2011).

I'm pleased to notify you that your proposal has been accepted.

Please let me know as soon as possible, and no later than 23 September 2011 if you still wish to present your poster.

Technical details for posters:
- All posters should feature a title, your name(s), name of your institution
- Posters will be presented on provided display boards; please do not mount on foam core or other materials
- Posters should be a maximum of 48 inches (122 cm) tall and 42 inches (107 cm) wide

In your acceptance, please confirm the following:

TITLE OF POSTER
AUTHOR(S), TITLE, AFFILIATION
ABSTRACT

I also recommend that you register for the conference as soon as possible. You may also make hotel reservations at the special conference rate.

Conference Registration:
http://www.lifeandliterature.org/p/registration.html

Hotel reservations:
http://www.lifeandliterature.org/p/chicago-information-and-local-planning.html

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Cheers,
Martin

1 POSTED TO BLOG 9/19/2011
Title: Romantic Natural History: Literature and Science in the Century Before Darwin's Origin (1859)

Author: Ashton Nichols, Walter E. Beach '56 Distinguished Chair in Sustainability Studies, Dickinson College

Abstract: This poster describes a website entitled Romantic Natural History. We often assume that Charles Darwin announced a new era in the scientific understanding of the natural world with the publication of his Origin of Species (1859). In fact, Darwin’s theory was the culmination of decades of speculation about connections between human beings and nonhuman “nature.” These ideas reflect not only in the work of natural scientists, philosophers, and theologians, but also the ideas of poets, novelists, and visual artists. Romantic Natural History surveys and organizes texts, images, and scholarship linking Romanticism and natural history in the period 1750-1859.

See: blogs.dickinson.edu/romnat

CONTACT:
nicholsa@dickinson.edu
Department of English
Dickinson College
P. O. Box 1773
Carlisle, PA 17013
717 245-1359 fax 245-1942

2
TITLE OF POSTER POSTED TO WEBSITE: 9/26/2011
The GRIB – A union catalogue of and scanning management tool for natural history libraries

AUTHOR(S), TITLE, AFFILIATION
Boris Jacob, Scientific Coordinator, Royal Museum for Central Africa / Tervuren, Belgium
Andreas Krausz, Dr., Head Office of the Common Library Network GBV (VZG) / Göttingen, Germany
Melita Birthälmer, BHL-Europe WP2 Leader, Museum für Naturkunde / Berlin, Germany

ABSTRACT
The Global References Index to Biodiversity (GRIB) is a union catalogue of European natural history libraries. It contains deduplicated records from BHL-Europe and BHL partner libraries and also serves as a management tool to support the digitisation workflow in these libraries. For each of the bibliographic items the GRIB holds information on its digitisation status. This can either be 1) not digitized yet, 2) nominated to be digitized by a Scientist, or 3) intended to be digitized by a librarian. If it is 4) already digitized and accessible in electronic form, then the GRIB links to the full text.

3 POSTED TO WEBSITE
POSTER TITLE:

Zea Books: Digital Imprint of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries
AUTHORS/TITLES/AFFILIATION

Sue Ann Gardner, Scholarly Communications Librarian, and Paul Royster, Scholarly Communications Coordinator, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ABSTRACT

Zea Books is the open-access digital works imprint founded by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries in 2010. Intended to complement, not compete with, the University of Nebraska Press, it gives a voice to scholars whose works would not meet the financial publication demands of a traditional press. Not limited to Nebraska authors, titles to date include De bestiis marinis, or, The Beasts of the Sea (Steller), the Dictionary of Invertebrate Zoology (Maggenti, Maggenti and Gardner), and A Nebraska Bird-Finding Guide (Johnsgard). Operations are overseen by the publisher, Paul Royster, and executive editor, Sue Ann Gardner. An adjunct board of advisors includes the Director of the University of Nebraska Press and UNL faculty.

sgardner2@unl.edu
University of Nebraska-Lincoln402-423-4771

4 ON BLOG
Koen Martens, Steven Dessein, Graham Higley, Isabelle Gerard, Laurence Bénichou

Koen.Martens@naturalsciences.be

EJT - A European Journal of Taxonomy Editor-in-Chief HYDROBIOLOGIA and EJT

Thousands of scholarly papers in natural history are published each year, but many taxonomic papers are published in small journals and do not get a high visibility. An investigation among the partners of the European consortium EDIT taught us that within this digital era, many taxonomic journals are faced with complex strategic and technical questions: visibility, access, format, and funding, issues difficult to tackle by individual institutions.

A group of natural history institutions wanted to break from this trend and launched a collectively owned, online journal in taxonomy under the name EJT (www.europeanjournaloftaxonomy.eu). It takes there is a clear need for natural history institutions to act as public publishers/producers of taxonomic information. Taxonomy needs is a journal that offers a communication channel for descriptive taxonomic work in botany, zoology and palaeontology, using the latest online scholarly standards and services.
Our poster describes this journal offering a long term, public business model that is favourable to the unique scientific environment of natural history science, taking into account the long shelve life of taxonomic papers and the correct use of nomenclature rules. This model guarantees open access without cost to authors.

Laurence Bénichou / Editorial Manager Scientific Publishing, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle

Steven Dessein / Editorial Manager Scientific Publishing, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle
Isabelle Gerard / Head of Publications Service, Royal Museum for Central Africa

Graham Higley / Head of NHM Library & Information Services, Natural History Museum London" Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences

5 Biodiversity Library Exhibition (BLE)

Jiri Frank / Mgr. / National Museum in Prague, Vaclavske namesti 68, 115 79 Prague 1, Czech Republic
Jiri Kvacek / RNDr., CSc. / National Museum in Prague, Vaclavske namesti 68, 115 79 Prague 1, Czech Republic
Jana Hoffmann / MA / Museum für Naturkunde, Invalidenstraße 43, 10115 Berli, Germany

The Biodiversity Library Exhibition (BLE) is a virtual exhibition of the digital content in the Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe. It is a dissemination and e-learning tool which highlights specific biodiversity content and makes it accessible for a wider audience. The first two exhibitions will feature BHL-Europe’s content on “spices” and “expeditions”, presenting beautiful illustrations and informative text in old and rare books. It will also provide useful information for the visitor, e.g. recipes. The attractive design and easy to use interface of BLE has a great potential to show that historical literature on biodiversity can be interesting to a wide audience.

6
Lizzy Komen

Biodiversity literature in Europeana Business Project Coordinator lizzy.komen@kb.nl "Europeana.eu provides online access to the digital resources from Europe’s museums, libraries, archives and audiovisual collections. Europeana currently provides access to over 19 million items from 27 EU countries. BHL-Europe adds substantial value to Europeana by making available a great amount of biodiversity literature.

“Europeana is the EU’s most visible expression of our digital heritage. […] Europeana has established itself as a reference point for European culture on the Internet. It reflects the ambition of Europe’s cultural institutions to make our common and diverse cultural and scientific heritage more widely accessible to all.” Neelie Kroes, EC Vice President

Jonathan Purday
Senior Communications Advisor Europeana
jonathan.purday@bl.uk

Dipl. Biol. Jana Hoffmann
Project Assistant BHL-Europe
Museum für Naturkunde - Leibniz Institute for Research on Evolution and Biodiversity at the Humboldt University Berlin

jana.hoffmann@mfn-berlin.de

7 POSTED TO BLOG
Vince Smith

No specimen left behind: Industrial scale digitisation of natural history collections Cybertaxonomist vince@vsmith.info "Digitisation of biodiversity literature and of specimens is crucial to mobilising our accumulated biodiversity knowledge and a cornerstone of Biodiversity Informatics research. A number of successful projects have advanced biodiversity informatics (e.g. BHL, BHL-E, GPI Paris Museum Herbarium) by dealing with uniform specimens (pages, herbarium sheets). Specimen digitisation more generally still lags far behind literature digitisation in terms of process rates and workflows. Detailed imaging and collections of associated metadata of individual specimens is enormously time-consuming. We discuss here a different approach to digitisation of natural history collections by:

determining significant parts of a collection with uniformly mounted specimens (e.g. drawers of insects, slides);
imaging and annotating en masse
software and hardware automation (conveyors, OCR, automatic ROI recognition);
assigning uIDs/DOIs;
partial opening of the image collection to develop crowdsourcing metadata enhancement." "Vladimir Blagoderov

Sackler Biological Imaging Lab
Natural History Museum, London
vlab@nhm.ac.uk
Natural History Museum, London

8 POSTED TO BLOG
Henning Scholz

The Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe BHL-Europe Project Coordinator henning.scholz@mfn-berlin.de BHL-Europe is mobilising and preserving digital European biodiversity literature and facilitating the open access to this literature through a multilingual BHL-Europe portal, the Global Reference Index to Biodiversity (GRIB), and Europeana. The BHL-Europe portal will not only be multilingual but incorporate functionalities not currently available in BHL-Classic. It will, for example, facilitate the search for common and scientific names of biological organisms as well as person names through the implementation of webservices (e.g. Catalogue of Life, VIAF). In order to serve a broader audience, the literature available in BHL-Europe is also accessible by Europeana, Europe's digital library, archive and museum. "Graham Higley: The Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD, United Kingdom
Jana Hoffmann: Museum für Naturkunde, Leibniz Institute for Research on Evolution and Biodiversity at the Humboldt University Berlin, Invalidenstraße 43, D-10115 Berlin, Germany" Museum für Naturkunde, Leibniz Institute for Research on Evolution and Biodiversity at the Humboldt University Berlin, Invalidenstraße 43, D-10115 Berlin, Germany ++49-30-20938864

9 FINAL POSTED TO BLOG 9/21/11
Title: “Online synergy: Sherborn’s Index animalium and the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
Authors: Grace Costantino and Leslie K. Overstreet
Affiliation (both): Smithsonian Institution Libraries

Abstract: The collection-based science of taxonomy provides internationally recognized names for biological taxa (primarily genera and species) and creates the necessary foundation for many applied sciences. These names, whether currently accepted or in synonymy, have been published in the scientific literature since the mid-18th century, and finding their original appearance – to verify the taxon described, for example – can be almost as hard as finding a needle in a haystack. In zoology, C.D. Sherborn’s Index animalium (1902-1933) solves this problem; it provides the original source for every genus name and species epithet in the zoological literature from the 10th edition of Linnaeus’s Systema naturae in 1758 (the official start-date of binomial nomenclature in zoology) to 1850. The Smithsonian Institution Libraries’ online version of the Index animalium allows researchers to search the entire multi-volume work by name, epithet, or other keyword. With the citation thus provided, researchers can then access the cited text itself, scanned in full, on the website of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). BHL is an international consortium of natural-history institutions, supported by Internet Archive, dedicated to making the historical literature in the natural sciences freely available on the Internet. To date, tens of thousands of titles have been mounted on the site, and the work continues.

E-mail: overstreetL@si.edu

10 FINAL POSTED TO BLOG 9/16/11

Title: Integration of African solitary bee biodiversity information
Authors: Willem Coetzer, South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity

Connal Eardley, Plant Protection Research Institute

Janine Kelly, Plant Protection Research Institute
Abstract:
This project will build on another project, funded by SABIF in 2010, in which about 500 000 specimen records from three South African museums were cleaned and migrated to Specify6. We are trying to develop capacity for (Specify-based) biodiversity information management in South Africa and Africa.

One of the main objectives of the current JRS-funded project is to make available online the Catalogue of Afrotropical Bees (Eardley and Urban, 2010). This catalogue lists 2755 valid bee names and 6989 invalid bee names in 26 671 citations of 1229 literature references. The catalogue has already been imported into Specify6. The catalogue is interesting because it represents a 30-year effort to tag legacy biodiversity literature semantically, on the theme of bees in Africa, even though the authors didn’t necessarily foresee the recent developments in biodiversity informatics. The catalogue also includes 6194 mentions of 59 countries where bees occur, 4005 mentions of 1219 visited plant species, 182 mentions of 115 plant species that bees nest in, 93 mentions of 66 parasite species hosted (some parasites are themselves bees) and 50 mentions of 37 hosts parasitised by parasitic bees.

How do we make the literature text itself available online?

Information on bees and pollination is very important in conservation and agriculture, particularly in the face of global change. There are excellent networks and collaborations on bee taxonomy and pollination ecology in Africa, which would benefit immensely from easier, integrated, structured and enriched access to bee biodiversity information and literature.

Contact: w.coetzer@saiab.ac.za