SIL BHL Staff Update October 26, 2007
SIL BHL Update: October 26, 2007
Work on the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) here at SIL and around the world is making great progress. Scanning operations are ramping up in the Boston area and BHL materials will soon be entering the workflow in the New York area.
Many of you probably saw the front page “above the fold” article in the New York Times on October 22 about the Open Content Alliance. The OCA is an umbrella group of libraries dedicated to making information available in an open manner. SIL and the Biodiversity Heritage Library are members of the OCA and were prominently mentioned in the article. Also, Tom Garnett, in his role as Director of the BHL was quoted. View the article here:
http://tinyurl.com/yvnpyx
You may also want to look at some of the comments on the article from the blogosphere:
http://tinyurl.com/27ty2x
SIL BHL Task Force
Courtney Shaw, Keri Thompson, and Suzanne Pilsk continue to refine the book pulling process from automated selection through return to shelf. Working with Eliza Gilligan for a preservation review of materials, SIL has had a very low rejection rate for materials at the scanner.
Ann Juneau and Polly Lasker have worked with the SIL BHL Task Force to create and order small “BHL stickers” to place near the barcodes of volumes that have been scanned. These will help to identify volumes that have been scanned and are now available online.
SIL BHL Scanning Center
The Internet Archive scanning station located in the Natural History building continues to make progress. Melissa Bell, who was temporarily assigned to Washington from New York, has moved on to her permanent position at the Boston Regional Scanning center. Cole LaVoie joined us in mid-October, replacing Melissa. Cole is a native of California, but is currently working at the Internet Archive's New York Public Library Scanning center.
SIL has also started scanning copies of Entomological News. This title will be scanned from its start date of 1890 through 2004. Tom Garnett has worked with the editorial staff of the journal to obtain permission to provide access to the title past the 1923 copyright cut-off date. This is the first of what BHL hopes will be many titles that will participate in making taxonomic literature openly available.
Scanning of SIL materials has now surpassed 20,000 pages and 300 volumes. To see SIL materials that have been scanned, see:
http://tinyurl.com/27xp8v
Other Scanning Centers
BHL scanning is now taking place at the Smithsonian (1 machine); the Northeast Regional Scanning Center (located at Boston Public Library, 10 machines); University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2 machines); Natural History Museum London (1 machine). BHL work is slated to start at the New York Public Library scanning center shortly (10 machines).
The links below will provide you with feed information on materials from the individual scanning centers as it becomes available:
Open Content Alliance and Related Meetings
Eight BHL member staff attended the OCA meeting in San Francisco on October 17. From the Smithsonian, Tom Garnett, Martin Kalfatovic, and Suzanne Pilsk attended. New developments, including a new print on demand machine, digital ILL, microfilm scanning, and bibliographic sharing.
The event also saw the premier of the OCA launch video (
http://tinyurl.com/283m24). A less professionally produced video of Tom Garnett's BHL update can be found at the Internet Archive (
http://tinyurl.com/29gnk3)
In addition to the main meeting, BHL members organized additional meetings while in the Bay Area. All BHL members and staff from partner institutions (University of Illinois, University of North Carolina, the Boston Library Consortium) met for strategy discussions; myself and Chris Freeland (Missouri Botanical Garden) met with software developers for future BHL projects; Suzanne Pilsk visited Google and staff of the Google Earth Project; all available BHL members met with the Internet Archive technical and engineering staff to enhance the BHL/IA working relationship; lastly, BHL staff met with the OpenLibrary (
http://demo.openlibrary.org/) development team (Karen Coyle, Aaron Swartz, Rebecca Malamud, et al.) to discuss possible partnerships.
Additionally, SIL staff (myself and Suzanne Pilsk) made an hour long presentation on the BHL, “The Biodiversity Heritage Library Mass Digitizing Project: A Grandeur in this View of Digital Libraries” at the LITA National Forum, October 6, 2007 in Denver, Colorado. The session was attended by 40 people (
http://tinyurl.com/ytpft6).
BHL Portal
The BHL development team (led by Chris Freeland) has released new functionality in the BHL Portal. The portal now allows users to search across all the scientific names indexed throughout the digital library and view a bibliography of occurrences - tentatively called "discovered bibliography". To view this new functionality in action, begin here:
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/NameSearch.aspx. You can search by any taxonomic name, such as Poa annua, or Poaceae, to return results. Next steps will be to allow users to search for a taxonomic name and return results for it and its synonyms, or taxa below.
BHL Publicity
As noted earlier, Ann Juneau, Courtney Shaw, Gil Taylor, and Martin Kalfatovic met September 26 to discuss promoting BHL and SIL's BHL activities in the Natural History and SI communities. In addition to these activities for our research community, there will be functions specifically for SIL staff to get an overview of the BHL. An open house at the SIL BHL scanning center will be announced in the near future so that interested staff can get a close up view of the SIL BHL scanning process. Stay tuned for further announcements!
BHL 2.0
In addition to the BHL portal which provides access to scanned material, the BHL has a number of other options for the public to learn more about the project. For news and other information about BHL, visit:
