Update for SIL Board 2009.06

BHL Update

SIL Board

June 25, 2009

General BHL News

• eBiosphere Conference in London (sponsored by EOL), drew over 400 prominent taxonomists from around the world to discuss bioinformatics and the latest developments in e-science. Of 20 papers at the conference, 11 directly mentioned BHL as a key element to the future of taxonomic research and as a cornerstone of e-taxonomy. BHL is viewed in the larger taxonomic community not as a test or demonstration project, but at an important tool for daily work. We, located in large natural history collections, sometimes forget that the vast majority of researchers around the world are not able to easily get the resources that we have in our stacks!
• New BHL Member Libraries
  Welcome to the newest members of the BHL; the BHL Institutional Council approved membership of two new members in May 2009. More details to follow about how they will be integrated into the BHL world-flow.
  • Academy of Natural Science (Philadelphia)
  • California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco)
• Quality Assurance Summit (GD, ET)
  There will be a QA summit in NYC at the NYBG on June 18-19; there will be participants from all the users of IA scanning facilities (except for NHM). Attending from SIL will be Erin Thomas, Keri Thompson, and Grace Duke. Bianca Lipscomb will also attend.
• BHL Europe
  In May 2009, BHL Europe was officially launched; funded by a €3.4 million grant by the EU, BHL-Europe will focus on technology, storage, and related issues. BHL-Europe partners will contribute millions of additional pages of taxonomic literature to the BHL portal. 28 institutions from 14 countries are participating in BHL-E.
• More Internationalization
  BHL is in discussion with China and Australia for BHL projects
• Importation of Other Scanning
  BHL will shortly be importing additional materials from other scanning operations. Among the first will be items from the California Digital Library (UC Berkeley, UCLA), other contributors will be Cornell University
• Library of Congress
  SIL has been in contact with the LC Science Division to work with them to scan material for BHL; LC will focus on areas not currently covered by BHL (e.g. paleontology)

• BHL Meet and Greets
  • SIL has organized three "meet and greets" for Smithsonian researchers to introduce them to BHL
• New videos on using the BHL
  • BHL Portal: Name Finding
  • BHL Portal: PDF Creation
  • BHL Portal: Name Finding via Search
  • SIL Digital Library: Scanning a Book
• New look for the BHL blog
• Recent and Upcoming SIL BHL Presentations around the world
  • Council of Botanical and Horticulture Librarians (May 2009, St. Louis): Martin Kalfatovic
  • Food for Thought Luncheon - James Smithson Society (June 2009, Washington): Nancy Gwinn
  • Field Museum/ALA (July 2009, Chicago): Martin Kalfatovic, Bianca Lipscomb, Suzanne Pilsk
  • Botany and Mycology 2009 (July 2009, Salt Lake City): Martin Kalfatovic
  • ASIS&T 2009 (November 2009, Vancouver, BC): Martin Kalfatovic

• 221,532 visitors to the BHL portal/ ~50% of those visits were by machines harvesting data
• Wikipedia is the 3rd highest referrer to BHL (meaning that people clicked on links in Wikipedia directing them to BHL content; increasingly, Wikipedia editors are linking to species information in BHL)
• 7,887 visitors to the BHL blog during that same time period; 1% of all BHL blog traffic comes from Twitter and Facebook
• Visitors: 221,532
• Page views: 1,147,773
• Visitors arrive from:
  • Google (52%)
  • Directly (21%)
  • EOL (4.01%)
  • Wikipedia (2.11%)
• Countries/Territories: 219 countries and territories; everywhere except for North Korea, Chad, Central African Republic, Western Sahara, Sierra Leone,Serbia, and Kyrgyzstan

• Smithsonian
  • CIS Pool Fund news: SIL received $50,000 from the CIS pool funds for FY 2009 to complete serial holdings on BHL related titles; this is the third year in a row that SIL has received pool funds specifically for BHL. Previous years saw allocations of $80,000 (FY 2007) and $70,000 (FY 2008). This is a total of $200,000 that SIL has received from the Institution for support of BHL activities. Serials holding, however, benefit the overall quality of the SIRIS library catalog
  • $30,000 (for FY 2008 and FY 2009) from the SIL Seidell allocation for BHL was transferred to the SIL Cataloging contract to support work on serials holdings and to increase the quality of rare book cataloging
• General
  • The next installment of the MacArthur/Sloan funding is expected in later summer
• Other
  • BHL members received a $40,000 IMLS planning grant to study issues related to "special" materials (these include folios, rare books, fragile books, tightly bound items etc.). SIL is participating in this grant and will participate in any follow on work
  • BHL members received $1 million for development of a Fedora digital repository from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; the Internet Archive received ~$1.1 million from the Moore Foundation for congruent Fedora development

• BHL article repository now in alpha testing (http://cite.biodiversitylibrary.org/). PLEASE NOTE: this is very much an alpha release and will be very sketchy!
• CITE will be a location for taxonomic groups to deposit previously scanned articles (as well as deposit taxa-specific bibliographies which can be used for scanning prioritization)

Scanning Statistics (as of June 18, 2009):

• PDFs generated by users: 5,256
• Pages in production: 13,913,634
• Items in production: 34,724
• Titles in production: 13,108
• SIL Pages in production: 2,058,420
• SIL Items in production: 5,725
• SIL Titles in production: 3,038
• 44,767,160 million taxonomic name strings located in BHL literature
• NOTE: "Production" means live and publicly available

Scanning Operations (SIL)

• FedScan (located at Library of Congress) ~ 100-200 volumes per week
• NH Scribe (down the hall from the Cullman) ~ special collections, items in need of special handling or care

Other scanning (non-SIL)

• Boston Public Library (Harvard MCZ and MBLWHOI)
• Jersey City (AMNH and NYBG)
• London (NHM)