The history of biodiversity through words and pictures

The history of biodiversity through

words and picturesTrish Rose-Sandler

Data Projects CoordinatorCenter for Biodiversity Informatics

Missouri Botanical Garden, St Louis MO USA

Curious Images conference British Library 2

What is BHL?

• A consortium of natural history, botanical libraries and research institutions

• An open access digital library for historic biodiversity literature

• An open data repository of taxonomic names and bibliographic information

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BHL CentralAFFILIATES• Academy of Natural Sciences Library• Chicago Botanical Garden Library• The Field Museum Library• Los Angeles County Natural History

Museum Library• National Agricultural Library

MEMBERS• American Museum of Natural History

Library• California Academy of Sciences Library• Cornell University Library• Harvard University Botany Library• Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of

Comparative Zoology• Library of Congress• Marine Biological Laboratory Library• Missouri Botanical Garden Library• Natural History Museum, London Library• The New York Botanical Garden Library• Royal Botanic Garden, Kew, Library• Smithsonian Libraries• Washington University at St. Louis Library• University of Illinois Library• United States Geological Survey Libraries

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Global Partners

Europe

China

Australia

Egypt

Brazil

Africa

Singapore12/18/2014

Curious Images conference British Library 512/18/2014

BHL Portal


BHL Book Viewer


Current BHL projects dealing with images• Art of Life• Purposeful Gaming and BHL

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What is Art of Life?

• Full title - The Art of Life: Data Mining and Crowdsourcing the Identification and Description of Natural History Illustrations from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL)

• Grant given to Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis. Partners :Indianapolis Museum of Art Lab, University of Colorado, Boulder

• Funded by National Endowment for the Humanities

• Runs May 2012-April 2015

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Picture blocks 87% effectiveContrast 88% effectiveColor ineffectiveCompression ineffective

Algorithm Analysis Tool


Macaw Classifying Tool


Crowdsourcing image description

Coming Soon…


What is Purposeful Gaming and BHL?

• Full title - Purposeful gaming and BHL: engaging the public in improving and enhancing access to digital texts

• National Leadership Grant for Libraries given to Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis.

• Partners include Harvard, Cornell, New York Botanical Garden

• Funded by IMLS

• Runs Dec 2013-Nov 2015

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Sample of poor OCR output from an 18th century publication.This page is from Linneaus' Species Plantarum published in 1753An image of the original text is on the left. The OCR is on the rightthe right

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A sample of poor OCR output from a hand written text. This page is from the Diaries of William Brewster, 1865-1919

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Text correction as a game! Similar to the idea of DigitalKoot but with a diversity of texts: books, journals, seed and nursery catalogs, hand-written fieldnotes and diaries


This is where we need TILT2


We enlisted Tiltfactor at Dartmouth as our game designer


Contact: Trish Rose-Sandler, Principal [email protected]

Thank you!For more informationhttp://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/

http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Art+of+Life

http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Purposeful+Gaming

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The history of biodiversity through words and pictures

Education

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