Biodiversity Heritage Library - an overview for the Australian Museum

BHL Australia2015-2016

Nicole KearneyCoordinator BHL Australia

@nicolekearney @bhl_au

Biodiversity Heritage Library


The world’s largest online repository for biodiversity heritage and archival materials.

www.biodiversitylibrary.org

Biological Literature

accessible & discoverable

Making our

Digitising our biodiversity literature

A synopsis of the Birds of Australia and the adjacent islands, John Gould, 1837.

Museum libraries are not usually open to the public, but occasionally treasures such as this are put on display in exhibitions. This beautiful volume by John Gould was featured in Museum Victoria’s recent “Art of Science” exhibition, but visitors to the exhibition were only able to view this single double-page spread.

Now that we have put it online, anyone in the world can turn these beautiful pages.


50+ MILLIONpages

188,000+ 220+volumes contributors

http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/collection/bhlau

The Naturalist's Miscellany, or Coloured figures Of natural objects, Vol. 10, George Shaw, 1799.

The first published description of the Duck-billed Platypus

“Of all the Mammalia yet known it seems the most extraordinary…

…at first view, it naturally excites the idea of some deceptive preparation by artificial means.”

Information on 170+ million species

BHL Australia (2011)

168,306pages

792volumes

Museum Victoria

Australian Museum

(University of Otago)

Western Australian Museum

(University of Tasmania)

Queensland Museum

(Western Australian Herbarium)

South Australian Museum

GeoScience Australia

BHL-Australia

Royal Botanic Gardens VIC

20152016

Biological Literature


Making our

REALLY

Biodiversity Heritage Library website

Taxonomic name recognition(searchable)

Optical character

recognition (searchable)

Links

Click on Link to View Page


Australian journals on BHL

More on: www.biodiversitylibrary.org/collection/bhlau

Gap-filling

Extending

Linking

In-copyright Material & License Agreements

x8 Australian agreements thus far…

Content curation – BHL Collections

Content curation – BHL Collections

Antarctic Exploration & Discovery

111 volumes from 46 titles, containing 40625 pages

First descriptions & illustrations @bhl_au

#PageFrights @bhl_au

#ColourOurCollections @bhl_au

Our online community (BHL users)

5.5+ MILLIONTotal unique users to date

Average monthly unique users (CY16)

98,000+

10+ MILLIONTotal website visits to date

Average monthly visits (CY16)175,000+

243 Countries & Territories

*Stats as of September 2016

Australian visits: 65,812

@bhl_au 460+ followers

10,500+ followers

10,700+ followers

24,000+ followers

Making

Scientific Artworkaccessible & discoverable

Common name

Scientific name

Location

Source library

Tagged = discoverable

Common name

Scientific name

Location

Source library

Tagged = discoverable (citizen scientists)

Original scientific nametaxonomy:bionomial=

Artist nameartist:name=

Accepted scientific nametaxonomy:bionomial=

Machine-readable tags

Common nametaxonomy:common=

Common name

Scientific name

Location

Source library

Tagged = discoverable

Original scientific nametaxonomy:bionomial=

Artist nameartist:name=

Accepted scientific nametaxonomy:bionomial=

Machine-readable tags

Common nametaxonomy:common=

Locationgeo:country=

AUSTRALIA

Rhycherus filamentosus

Making

Field Diariesaccessible & discoverable

Why are field diaries so important?

Field diaries are full of

DATAanimals plant

s

fossils

weather

habitats

DATE: 26 September 1948

OBSERVATIONS

LOCATION:Lake Corangamite

DATE: 26 September 1948

OBSERVATIONS

LOCATION:Lake Corangamite

BEHAVIOUR: nesting

SILVER GULLS (26.9.48)

300 nests on 1 island

15 islands of similar size

Estimates 4500 nests

Nesting success~ 1.5 eggs/nest

=7000 new gulls from this year from this locality

Our scientists need this data!

Images: Heath Warwick & Nicole Kearney / Museum Victoria

19312012 2014

Grampians National Park

Our scientists need this data!

Images: Heath Warwick & Nicole Kearney / Museum Victoria

2012 2014• Past species

distribution & abundance

• Future biological surveys

• Threatened & pest species management

A historic baseline for climate change research

Underutilised resource

Inaccessible in their current state

• single hard copy• single location• hand-written (in the field)• historic scripts• unsearchable• uncatalogued

Documentation?

Management?

Preservation?

Standards of practice?

Access?

Procedures?

Unknown items in our collections…

Ornithology Department Archives

“Estate of Graham Brown – note books”

Catalogued in our Records & Archives database (TRIM)

?

Step 1: create individual records

A record for every item

Step 2: create digital versions

Digitisation & post processing

A digital version in our database

OCR from a page of Graham Brown’s diary

l>^v-^wAl^ livU*^/) Curiae '^tila'* -u^vttcvi Lsefei cit^:< Lv. 1^ Ol^Vm?iJcw , L>w i^-Ôtv^ dS^îL* ll^Ûk^ M/tTM^li?'^ tvc4fi>r '^^-^ G^WtY^^ uve^v. llCCUvlr]^vv\l^ '^L^>u^ l^t^

You can’t search handwriting

Step 3: transcription

http://volunteer.ala.org.au/

How to attract online volunteers?


Friday Monday = 30% transcribed

Forums build online communities


Validator

Ready for display?

17.


DigiVol export

Extracted transcript in Word


Converted & reformatted


Ready for display!

17.

Transcript in our database

Step 4: make them accessible

Add metadata

Upload into Internet Archive

https://archive.org/

Final destination: Biodiversity Heritage Library

http://www.biodiversitylibrary.orgwww.biodiversitylibrary.org

Along with the transcriptions!

http://www.biodiversitylibrary.orgwww.biodiversitylibrary.org

Progress thus far…


• 42 field diaries digitised

• 22 diaries uploaded onto DigiVol & transcribed

• 98 crowd-sourced volunteers

Thank you Paul Flemons & Rhiannon Stephens!

New homes for our field diaries

… in our Scientific Art & Observation Collection.

Final step?Tell everyone!

blog.biodiversitylibrary.org

But what about the data?

5 Graham Brown field diaries:

5611 animal sightings

547 mentions of people and organisations

Graham Brown, 1948

Date Species Location09/09/1947 Red Wattle bird Colac, near lake, in flowering gums13/09/1947 Crested Grebes Colac East, end of Church St, mouth

of the creek

13/09/1947 Little Pied Cormorant Colac, perched on the wreck13/09/1947 Mountain Duck Colac East, end of Church St, mouth

of the creek

13/09/1947 Musk Duck Colac, on the lake13/09/1947 Silver Gull Colac, over the lake, opposite

Queen's Avenue

Data – science

Data – history

547 mentions of people &

organisations

Historical descriptions

of places & events

Personal anecdotes: the life of a 1940s

country doctor

People are using the data!

23 October 1950

At Gundagai the Murrumbidgee was flooded…

…small eucalypts that had been planted and were growing to cover the hillside below the memorial…

…the afternoon was tiring for the road was bad.


Geoscience Australia: Antarctic Field Diaries

69 diaries on DigiVol68 transcribed

So who are these online volunteers?

• Clear online tutorials• Online forums

BarongarookIrrewillipePorepunkahWarracknabeal

• Email support & feedback• People & place name index

• Personal acknowledgement

Supporting online volunteers

Rewarding online volunteers


Slide credit: Paul Flemons, DigiVol Volunteer Survey, April 2015

Taxonomic Descriptions


Making

Page R (2016) Towards a biodiversity knowledge graph. Research Ideas and Outcomes 2: e8767. doi: 10.3897/rio.2.e8767

Biodiversity knowledge graph

Rod Page Professor of TaxonomyUniversity of Glasgow



Rod Page Professor of TaxonomyUniversity of Glasgow

The links that SHOULD

be present between core biodiversity

datasets online


Linking our core biodiversity data



Taxonomic descriptions in the literature

Scientific namesin taxonomic databases


Taxonomic literature is the foundation upon which our understanding of biodiversity is based.




Taxonomic descriptions in the literature

& elsewhere

Scientific namesin taxonomic databases

Aggregator of information about all Australian species

- Museums - Universities - Government departments - Herbaria - Individuals - Community groups

Yet…

BHL URL

National Species List – editor interface

biodiversity.org.au

Links to BHL

biodiversity.org.au

Without links, taxonomic databases are little more than online collections of index cards.

Rod Page, 2016

...technology invented by Linnaeus

…in the 1760s.

Who’s going to add all the links?

• Taxonomic community (manually)e.g. NSL staff

• Online community (crowdsourcing)e.g. citizen scientists

• Script (automatically)e.g. Rod Page

bionames.org

gbif.org

Definitive version of this article online

gbif.org

120,000 links

Link

In an ideal world…

1851

PDF


australianmuseum.net.au

1851

australianmuseum.net.au

1851

Shane McEvey

DOI (digital object identifier)

• definitive version

• a character string used to uniquely and permanently identify an electronic object

DOI (BHL)

DOI(external)

1858= out of copyright!

DOI

Link

Dactylopsila trivirgata Gray, 1858


Theory of evolutionvia natural selection

Wallace’s Line

This is the sort of contextual information that is contained within our biodiversity literature,

and why it is so important that we make it freely available online for everyone.

Thank you

Nicole [email protected] @nicolekearney

Elycia [email protected]@elyw

BHL Australia@BHL_au

Biodiversity Heritage Library - an overview for the Australian Museum

Science

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