#BHLNDSR

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE ILLUSTRATIONS?

Introduction

My project at the Missouri Botanical Garden focuses on access to illustrations in BHL’s corpus of biodiversity literature. I’ve dipped my toes into the related areas of interface design for digital special collections exhibitions, digital humanities, metadata, social media outreach, and rare books in the course of my studies and work. The possibility for engagement and exploration of cultural heritage in the digital environment is infinitely exhilarating. I am fortunate to be able to dive into these topics while making concrete progress on a project that will serve...

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REFLECTING ON OPEN ACCESS AND CODE4LIB 2017

 

In considering how to consolidate my thoughts from Code4Lib 2017, I spent some time reviewing the pre-conference workshops and the interesting and directly relevant talks from last week. Ultimately, as I am sure many other attendees discovered, I found that the framework of the conference and a lot of our work as library technologists was best examined by Christina Harlow in her keynote “Resistance is Fertile.”1 There were many (many...

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Defining the Scope of Biodiversity Literature by Alicia Esquivel

 

One of the first steps of performing a collection analysis is to define the scope of the collection. While I am focused on analyzing the corpus of BHL for my project, this collection only represents a subset of all biodiversity literature. After defining the scope of biodiversity literature, we can start to understand the coverage of the BHL collection and identify its gaps to target future digitization.

The term “biodiversity” is a contraction of “biological diversity,” first used in 1986 during the planning meeting for National Forum on BioDiversity....

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Transcription Tools: a survey by Katie Mika, NDSR Resident

Field notebooks and diaries have historically been retained by natural history institutions as reference files for museum specimen and associated collecting events. More recently, however, researchers have begun to uncover vast historical data sets as part of their scholarship in scientific taxonomy, species distribution and occurrences, climate change studies, and history of science. Field notebooks contain significant information related to scientific discovery and are rich sources for data that describes biodiversity across space and time. They enhance our understanding of field...

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