Biodiversity Heritage Library, an effective local-global collaboration. The perspective from Woods Hole.

©2015 MBLWHOI Library www.mblwhoilibrary.org

Biodiversity Heritage Library

An effective local-global collaborationLibrary Lunchtime Discussion, May 28, 2015, Smith Conference Room

Ellen Levy and Matthew Person

Is the science literature you are

looking for available online?

Is it freely available?

What about pre/post 1923 IN/OUT of

copyright content?

questions library directors

were asking themselves in the

first years of the 21st Century

BHL Early Timeline

2003 – (Colorado), Encyclopedia of Life meeting

Feb. 2005- Library and Laboratory: the marriage of research, data, and the taxonomic community (London)

May 2005 (Washington DC), groundwork for BHL laid

June 2006. (DC) Organizational Technical meeting

Oct. 2006 (St Louis/San Francisco) Tech meetings

Feb 2007 (Cambridge MA) Organizational Meeting

May 2007 (ONLINE!) EOL and BHL Launch

Summer 2007(WOODS HOLE) MBLWHOI Library begins scanning

Fall 2007 First nuts and bolts staff meeting St. Louis

Feb 2008 Launch of EOL species pages linked to BHL literature

• The original funding for BHL came via the Encyclopedia of Life through a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (2007-2013).

• The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation• The Richard Lounsbery Foundation• Institute of Museum and Library Services

(IMLS)• JRS Biodiversity Foundation• National Endowment for the Humanities

(NEH)• National Science Foundation (NSF)• American Entomological Society

• American Museum of Natural History• Cornell University Library• Harvard Botany Library• MCZ Harvard, Ernst Mayr Library• Field Museum of Natural History• University of Illinois• Library of Congress• MBLWHOI Library• Missouri Botanical Garden• National Library Singapore• Natural History Museum London• New York Botanical Garden• Royal Botanic Garden Kew• Smithsonian Institution Libraries• USGS • CONABIO – Mexico Biodiversity Commission

BHL Partner Institutions

©2015 MBLWHOI Library www.mblwhoilibrary.org

•How did the MBLWHOI Library become a part of this impressive project?

©2015 MBLWHOI Library www.mblwhoilibrary.org

If you are going to build a legacy online library collection, you need to be able to contribute content from a legacy physical library collection which our more than century old library stacks is built of …

A local – global collaboration• Insight• Understanding of

Sustainability• Local- global Vision• Technical expertise • Cutting edge

informatics tools• Global smarts• Local smarts• Service to Woods Hole

scientist base

Work identical to what was taking place here at MBLWHOI was taking place at our partner libraries – this 2010 photo from the 1st Global BHL Meeting, Smith Conference Room

Our MBLWHOI BHL Staff, involved in both the stacks processing portion of the project, provided in the early years a lot of nuts and bolts hands on work, as well as project development work such as bringing content we scanned from the BHL website into our local library catalog, which my colleague Ellen will speak of shortly.

Processing

Transporting to Boston

Scanning at BPL by IA

Returned to MBLWHOI, QA/QCADDED to LOCAL Catalog

The Art of Life:

• This project seeks to liberate natural history illustrations from the digitized books and journals in the online Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) through development of software tools for automated identification and description of visual resources.

FLICKR TAGGING EVENT AT SMITHSONIAN

BEANSTALK

From: Neil A. Harriman

I just want to say THANK YOU. Your site is of the greatest value to people like me who aren't fortunate enough to have access to major research libraries. I cannot even begin to imagine the effort and intelligence that has gone into creating these pages electronically. I am deeply grateful.

E-mailSent by: Mary Malloy, Sea Education Association February 18, 2008

Dear Diane,That's it! Many thanks. I am so happy to finally have a copy of thisbook that I can print out and use with students. I really appreciateyour help on this and look forward to getting back to the rare booksroom.

All the best,Mary

Possible local project: A patron recently pointed out to us that abstracts from the MBL annual report, published for many years in the Biological Bulletin were never indexed –in the same way as other article content – leaving this abstract content difficult to discover. We could article-ize this content in the BHL to make the abstracts discoverable.

©2015 MBLWHOI Library www.mblwhoilibrary.org

THANK YOU!- QUESTIONS?

Library Lunchtime Discussion, May 28, 2015, Smith Conference Room

Ellen Levy and Matthew Person