EML Blog

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...

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...

WORKSHOP ROUNDUP

In the past month, I’ve been able to participate in several workshops relevant to my project and to BHL in general. On February 15th I attended a training session on the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL) project presented by Mariah Lewis of the New York Botanical Garden. The workshop was held at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden, one of...

"BHL BOOTCAMP"

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Connecting the National Institute of Ecology in South Korea with the MCZ

Dr. Choe and Dr. Hanken sign the MOU

On October 7, 2016, the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) at Harvard University and the recently founded National Institute of...

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....

Introducing the NDSR at BHL Cohort and Blog!

This year, five NDSR residents will help us plan the next generation of BHL. You can stay up-to-date with their progress and findings on the new NDSR at BHL blog!

As part of "Foundations to Actions: Extending Innovations in Digital Libraries in Partnership with NDSR Learners," the BHL NDSR residents, stationed at geographically-dispersed BHL partner institutions, will work on interrelated...

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...

Fair Use Week is Here!

This week, February 20-24, Harvard is celebrating the fourth annual Fair Use Week. It’s an opportunity to highlight Fair Use, the doctrine that brief excerpts of copyrighted material may be used in teaching, research, news reporting and criticism without permission from or payment to the copyright holder. Find out more about events here at ...

'What’s in a Name?' Launched at Harvard Museum of Natural History

Why are names important in science? What is the difference between scientific names (also known as Latin names or taxonomic names) and common names? Why do some species have multiple names? The grant project team for What’s in a Name, supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), set out to find answers and develop exhibits and other ways for anyone to explore this phenomenon. With millions of different species to identify and understand, the process of...