Person:

Rinaldo, Constance

Ten major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions in the United Kingdom and the United States joined in 2005 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.’ Headquartered at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is one of the cornerstones of the Encyclopedia of Life, a global effort to document all 1.8 million named species of animals, plants, and other forms of life on earth. This paper provides an overview of the BHL and its potential impact on biodiversity research, describes the BHL portal and its innovative search services, and provides a case study of the process from one of the members: the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University.

Information held in Libraries and Archives expands scientific knowledge by connecting specimens to rich data such as observations taken at the time of collection, species descriptions, and distribution records. Digitization of these resources transport them from the individual library and archives to the world. However, many of the primary resources are handwritten, limiting their use and reuse due to difficulties in deciphering cursive writing and a lack of machine readable data. This paper presents three case studies from the Harvard University Herbaria (HUH) Botany Libraries (HUH) and the Harvard University Ernst Mayr Library and Archives (EMLA) of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) that utilize crowd-sourcing, detailed access and discovery tools, and open access platforms to make handwritten materials more accessible to researchers as well as connecting content across collections held within and outside of Harvard University.

Over the last two decades, libraries and archives of natural history museums and botanical gardens in the US have spent major efforts to digitize their holdings. However, transporting these digitized resources from individual repositories to a wider community of researchers is challenging. Many of the primary resources are handwritten which limits their use and reuse because cursive writing and personal shorthand are difficult to decipher and the documents mostly lack machine readable data. This paper presents three case studies from the Harvard University Herbaria (HUH) Botany Libraries and the Harvard University Ernst Mayr Library and Archives (EMLA) of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) that utilize crowd-sourcing, detailed access and discovery tools, and open access platforms to make handwritten materials more accessible to researchers by bridging content across collections held within and outside of Harvard University. The case studies show that different approaches can yield opportunities for mining data because transcription of handwritten documents and enhanced metadata allows searching previously unavailable words and phrases such as taxonomic names. Content contributed to the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and the tools and services available in the BHL were integral to the work. The end result shows how information held in natural history libraries and archives contributes to the expansion of scientific and cultural historical knowledge by increasing access to previously unavailable historical scientific information through digitization, metadata enhancement and transcription.