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Biodiversity Heritage Library
A Knowledge Domain Repository

Community-Driven Open Access

Tom Garnett

SSP November Tom Garnett
1
12, 2007 Biodiversity Heritage

In any well-appointed Natural History Library
there should be found every book and every
edition of every book dealing in the remotest
way with the subjects concerned. One never
knows wherein one edition differs from or
supplements the other and unless these are
on the same table at the same time it is not
possible to collate them properly. Moreover
for accurate work it is necessary for the
student to verify every reference he may find;
it is not enough to copy from a previous
author; he must verify each reference itself
from the original.

Charles Davies Sherborn, Epilogue to Index Animalium, March
1922
Charles Davies Sherborn (1861-1942)

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Yet another physical difficulty is the
task of assembling the library and
indexes which will enable the student
to work under proper conditions….
the beginner must now be prepared
to spend liberally, or else must
establish himself in an institution
where a large library exists; if he work
by himself with only a few books, he
will have to confine himself to a very
narrow specialty indeed.
'The Limitations of Taxonomy' by J.M. Aldrich, Science, April 22,
1927, vol. LXV, no. 1686, p.381

Insecta. Diptera. Volume I (1886-1901)

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The cited half-life of
publications in taxonomy
is longer than in any other
scientific discipline
-Macro-economic case for open access, Tom Moritz

-Current taxonomic
literature often relies on
texts and specimens >
100 years old.
Levinus Vincent
Elenchus tabularum, pinacothecarum, 1719

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The Taxonomic
Impediment
“The taxonomic
impediment is a term
that describes the gaps
of knowledge in our
taxonomic system”
- Darwin Declaration, 1998

Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon
Histoire naturelle : générale et particulière (Oiseaux), 1799-1808

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The essential requirements for
accessing and utilising this global
information are:
• that there is access to information held
in national/regional/global collections
• that electronic data is efficiently
captured and provided in useable form
• that existing information held
in literature and by current
experts is made available
electronically
• that stability of scientific names of
organisms, used to access this
Thylacine from Philip Lutley Sclater,
information, is promoted
Guide to the Gardens of the Zoological Society of London, - Darwin Declaration, 1998
1891

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Convention on Biological
Diversity: Article 17
… exchange of information
shall include exchange of
results of technical, scientific
and socio-economic
research … It shall also,
where feasible, include
repatriation of information.

Henry Bates
Insecta. Coleoptera, 1881-1884

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Biologia Centrali-Americana
8 Edited by Frederick Ducane
7
Godman and Osbert Salvin
London : Pub. for the editors by R.
6
H. Porter, 1879-1915
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Chart showing distribution in
4
public collections of the
3
complete 63 volume sets held
2 worldwide.
1 2 complete copies in Central
0
America held at the
US & Canada Europe Mexico & C.
America
South
America
Smithsonian Tropical
Research Institute Library
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Vishwas Chavan travels a lot. An
informatician based at the National
Chemical Laboratory in Pune, India, he
collects data on what types of animal live
where in India to enter into a biodiversity
database … Much of the information
Chavan seeks is in old, out-of-print
tomes … To find them, Chavan has
spent years trailing around libraries. He
dreams of the day when books such as
these are scanned and made available
as digital files on the Internet.
“Science in the Web Age: The Real Death of Print”
by Andreas von Bubnoff
Nature 438, 550-552 1 December 2005

Henry Walter Bates
The Naturalist on the River Amazons, 1863

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Library and Laboratory: the
Marriage of Research, Data and
Taxonomic Literature
London, February 2005
Eighty participants from 22 countries gathered
to discuss the status and future of access to
the taxonomic literature and to propose an
agenda for actions that would improve the
research environment for taxonomy. The
participants were biologists; librarians;
conservation workers; publishers;
representatives of learned and professional
societies, private foundations and government
agencies; and specialists in information
Progne subis- Purple Martin technology.
Illustrations of the nest and eggs of birds of Ohio,
1879-1886

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Based on the clear priorities of the London
conference, the libraries involved gathered in
Washington to lay out the ground work for the
Biodiversity Heritage Library, which is a
response to a global community need.
Representatives of a number of major natural
history and botanical libraries met at the
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
in Washington, D.C. to develop a strategy and
operational plan to digitize the published
literature of biodiversity held in their respective
collections and to make that literature available
for open access and responsible use as a part of
a global “biodiversity commons.”

Ernest Ingersoll
Hand-book to the National Museum … Smithsonian Institution, 1886

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• Museums
– Natural History Museum (London)
– Smithsonian Institution
– American Museum of Natural History]
• Botanical Gardens
– Missouri Botanical Garden
– New York Botanical Garden
– Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
• University Libraries
– Botany Libraries, Harvard University
– Ernst Meyer Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard
University
• Research Institute Library
– Marine Biological Laboratory / Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Library (MBL/WHOI)

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Collaborators:
Internet Archive
International Commission on Zoological
Nomenclature
Open Content Alliance
European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy
Global Biodiversity Information Facility
(GBIF)
Many more under negotiation

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Internet Archive
Set up scanning
centers in London,
New York,
Washington, Boston,
etc. High-quality, non-
destructive
Scanning.
Image files and text
derived from OCR.
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“Guano diggers among the
albatrosses. Laysan Island”

At this stage, we would
have page pictures, “dirty
OCR”, some metadata,
but what good is it? Will
researchers be left like
these guano diggers in
Hawaii?

Lionel Walter Rothschild
The avifauna of Laysan and the neighboring islands, 1893-1900

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Mandates:
Open Access: all content
can be reused,
repurposed, reformatted.
Congruent: must fit in to
and contribute to a
healthy knowledge
ecology.
Reptilia and Batrachia. (1885-1902) by Albert C.L.G. Günther

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BHL Portal
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org

Serve image and text files;
create volume, part, piece
metadata; ingest page level
metadata at scanning level
for the creation of page level
Globally Unique Identifiers
(GUIDs) for linking to other
Jacob Christian Schäffer
taxonomic services
Elementa entomologica . . . 1766.

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Classes of texts
Each class presents a unique set of issues to resolve:
Public Domain – pre-1923
Post-1923 monographs
some with copyright renewals
some without copyright renewals
Non-profit learned society journals with permissions
Commercial journals
Gray literature
Archival material

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BHL Seeks Permissions from Copyright Holders
Opt in Copyright Model: The BHL will actively work with
professional societies and associations to integrate their
publications into the BHL in a way that serves the
societies’ missions and goals
BHL will digitize learned society backfiles and mount them
through the BHL Portal at no cost.
Will provide a set of files to the publishers for reuse as they
see fit.
Will index the articles using Taxonomic Intelligence,
thereby vastly increasing their usability.

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What Does the BHL Offer to Publishers?
Use of the articles will increase as evidenced by citation upsurge.
Long-term management of the digital assets is provided by the BHL at
no cost so it’s “SEP.”
Publishers’ content is embedded in the emerging knowledge ecology
that is sweeping biology in this century .
Structural markup of backfiles into conformance with NLM DTD
(working on it).
Thirteen Permission Agreements to date. More under negotiation.
Integration with gray literature in later phases of project.

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Embedding Content in the Knowledge Ecology

The BHL is primarily funded as a component of
the Encyclopedia of Life, an international effort
to create an authoritative website for every
species of the earth’s biota.

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Embedding Content in the Knowledge Ecology
Species names, taxon concepts, and the classification of
living organisms are the basis for linking multiple
disciplines such as evolutionary biology, taxonomy,
genomics, agriculture, conservation, etc.
Taxonomic intelligence algorithms are being developed to
mine the BHL content to link species names with other
biological resources.

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Co-evolving bioinformatics resources
produce a rich information ecology:
Consortium for the Barcoding of Life
(CBOL) with gene sequences deposited
in GenBank.
GBIF’s Electronic Catalog of Taxonomic
Names
Hebaria and museum specimen databases
Electronic Gazetteers and GPS.
Additional services – you’re invited to help

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• Scientific and Scholarly Support Strategy
– Make it too useful not to support.
– Embed it current and developing workflows
for the identification, tracking, documenting,
and researching the biota. BHL is building
on many documented use cases.
– Network with many professional societies.
– Automated structural markup of journal
literature to bring the digitized ocr into
conformance with the NLM DTD.

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• <article>
• <title>A BRIEF CONSIDERATION OF CERTAIN POINTS IN THE MORPHOLOGY OFTHE FAMILY
CHALCIDID^E.*.</title>
• <author>L. O. HOWARD.</author>
• <volume>1</volume>
• <issue>2</issue>
• <start_page>65</start_page>
• <end_page>86</end_page>
• <start_count_page>85</start_count_page>
• <end_count_page>106</end_count_page>
• <start_page_image_file>3908800908001101smthrich_0085.djvu</start_page_image_file>
• <end_page_image_file>3908800908001101smthrich_0106.djvu</end_page_image_file>
• </article>
• - <article>
• <title>FURTHER NOTES ON PHENGODES AND ZARHIPIS.</title>
• <author>DR. C. V. RILEY.</author>
• <volume>1</volume>
• <issue>2</issue>
• <start_page>86</start_page>
• <end_page>96</end_page>
• <start_count_page>106</start_count_page>
• <end_count_page>116</end_count_page>
• <start_page_image_file>3908800908001101smthrich_0106.djvu</start_page_image_file>
• <end_page_image_file>3908800908001101smthrich_0116.djvu</end_page_image_file>
• </

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• Legal Sustainability Strategy
– Avoid legal conflicts.
– Keep copyright infringement risk low. It is
impossible to eliminate it altogether.
– Obtain permissions where feasible .
– Where it isn’t feasible, move on.

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• Financial Sustainability Strategy
– Quick ramp-up high early costs – development, mass
scanning, etc. Drive long-term costs down the
asymptote toward zero.
– Derive some long-term costs from the operating
budgets of the member institutions. (examples under
consideration: acquisitions budget, staff positions,
etc.)
– Integrate functions/tasks with wider efforts where
appropriate, e.g. mass storage.
– Clear roles for staff who wear multiple hats. Two full-
time grant funded positions currently but >15 staff
who make substantive contributions.
– Make the BHL absolutely essential.

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• The Long Now Strategy
– Institutions that are creating the BHL exist to
persist through time. That’s an important
part of their business. Use them.
– The future is uncertain, the technology
landscape changes, people pass on. So
create consortial structures that are low-
overhead, flexible, and can respond quickly.
F2F interaction is surprisingly necessary to
create this.

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• The Long Now Strategy (cont.)
– Take Risks. Why?
– “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most
assuredly we shall all hang separately.“
– Interoperability is the key. Repository
islands will sink.
– Interested in helping? Contact me.
– garnettt@si.edu

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