Seidell 2010

Smithsonian Institution Libraries Seidell Funding: 2010-2014

Smithsonian Institution Libraries received $1.5 million from the Smithsonian’s Atherton Seidell Endowment Fund to support SIL’s participation in the Biodiversity Heritage Library Project for 2010-2014. Previously, the Seidell Endowment supported SIL’s work on BHL with $200,000 for 2007-2009.

The Seidell funds will be used to support the following BHL activities:

Additional scanning through the Internet Archive at the FedScan facility and onsite at the Smithsonian
Purchase of a large format, high speed digital camera for digitization of folio volumes, large fold-outs, and other materials not suitable for the Scribe workflow; staffing for this new equipment
Programming and associated costs to design an effective digitization workflow to ingest locally scanned materials into the BHL portal
Purchase of storage media for potential re-hosting of SIL scanned BHL content
Continued funding for two library technicians for ongoing digitization
Funding of a metadata technician to work on portal editing, bibliographic control, pagination and other tasks associated with increasing the findability and usefulness of BHL content

SIL is grateful for the strong show of support from the Smithsonian’s Under Secretary for Science for BHL and SIL’s continued participation in the project.

Previous SIL digital projects funded by the Seidell Endowment include:

The Biologia Centrali-Americana
The Index Animalium
Publications of The United States Exploring Expedition
Contributions from the United States National Herbarium
Publications of the United States National Museum