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January 2024 BHL Monthly Highlights

BHL launched a new working group (BHL-WIKI) in January. From the group’s charter, “The BHL-WIKI working group members are dedicated to converting BHL’s legacy data into a computationally usable resource and expanding global access to biodiversity knowledge for all.” Read more about the planned work of this group below in the BHL-WIKI Highlights.

BHL Australia welcomed 5 new Australian contributors to BHL in 2023, bringing their total to 48 contributors. Several more are expected early in 2024. For a complete list of BHL Australia contributors, visit https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/collection/bhlau.

History of Exhibitions at the Field Museum 1921-1959 is now available on the Illinois Digital Archives. This 2.5 year project led by the Field Museum library yielded more than 4,200 entries with historical photos and data (including references to Field Museum Bulletin articles obtained from BHL) illustrates the first four decades of exhibitions in the current museum building. Searching “2023” will also pull up a range of current exhibition photos. This is a great resource for historians, scientists, our public audiences, and our own staff to explore the history of exhibitions at the Field.

Presentations

No BHL presentations or publications were recorded in January.

Did you give a presentation in January and don’t see it highlighted here? Let us know about your BHL-related papers, posters and presentations by filling in the Presentations form, available on confluence here: https://confluence.si.edu/display/BHL/BHL+Presentations

USER FEEDBACK

Overall

• 49 new tickets added to our Gemini Issue Tracking system
• 67% of these tickets, or 33, were added by BHL Staff
• 30 tickets were closed -- thank you for resolving outstanding Gemini tickets as you can.
• Approximately 3,637 tickets remain open in our system (this number includes permissions title tickets, but excludes the 330+ rights holder tickets created as placeholders to structure the PERM project as a relational database).

COLLECTIONS HIGHLIGHTS

Top Contributors in January by Page Count

1. Boston Public Library 23,034
2. Smithsonian Libraries and Archives 13,256
3. University Library, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign 10,110
4. U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Library 6,232
5. University of British Columbia Library 5,914

86,485 Total Pages contributed to BHL in January
↓ from 136,921 pages in the previous month and > our 2023 monthly average of 85,193 pages

The BHL Collections Committee has sent out a call to its previous members to reconvene. A call for interest to participate in 2024 committee initiatives will go out to BHL Staff in early February. The committee will follow the Cataloging and Metadata Committee’s model of meeting twice monthly overall, with one meeting dedicated to Gemini backlog grooming, review, and agenda planning, and another subsequent meeting to work through Gemini issues. The meeting schedule is in progress.

In-copyright content update: Progress continues to move permissions related Gemini tickets from the BHL Feedback (FEED) project to the new Permissions (PERM) project. For tickets that have moved to PERM, there is now a new field “Moving Wall” that can be filtered by Y/N to identify titles that need additional content added now that the year has changed. Over the past two months, several permissions titles have been caught up on their moving walls primarily thanks to NYBG’s volunteer, Ellen Murphy. As tickets continue to be migrated, more comprehensive information will be available regarding BHL moving wall tasks. It’s harder to assess page counts for rights holders, but it is worth noting January’s top 5 rights holder contributions by item count:

• Castlemaine Field Naturalists Club 147
• American Museum of Natural History Library 141
• Field Naturalists’ Club of Ballarat 116
• International Carnivorous Plant Society 22
• Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle 21

Thank you for your efforts to secure permission, add, and maintain in-copyright content in the BHL collection!

CATALOGING AND METADATA COMMITTEE HIGHLIGHTS

• Officially welcomed Daniel Euphrat (SLA) and Elizabeth McKinley (Field Museum) as the new Committee co-chairs. 🎉🎉
• Updated documentation regarding parallel enumeration.
• Began work to remove over 2,000 unrecognized LCCNs from BHL.
• Addressed several Gemini tickets pertaining to preceding, succeeding, and merged titles.
• METACAT tickets closed this month: 11

PERSISTENT IDENTIFIER WORKING GROUP (PIWG) HIGHLIGHTS

• Uploaded article metadata into BHL for, and assigned DOIs to:
• The Canadian Field Naturalist (approximately 9800 BHL DOIs acquired after permission was given)
• Carnivorous Plants Newsletter (558 non-BHL DOIs added: 439 to existing segments; 119 to new segments)
• Northern Territory Naturalist, (2019, 15 articles/DOIs)
• Australasian Plant Conservation: journal of the Australian Network for Plant Conservation (2004, 57 articles/DOIs)
• Muelleria: An Australian Journal of Botany (v. 41, 2022-2023, 7 articles/DOIs)
• Uploaded article metadata for:
• Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (224 articles added)

TECHNICAL TEAM HIGHLIGHTS

• Began work on modifications to Macaw and the Internet Archive Harvest process to support the import of segments that can be combined into “Virtual Items”
• Added open licenses to all BHL GitHub repositories
• Removed the Stay Connected footer from the BHL web site and replaced the obsolete AddThis widget with static links to social media sites
• Removed invalid LCCN values from BHL
• A replacement for BHL’s aging search server has been acquired and is being installed and configured.
• Posted BHL Technical Development: Year in Review on BHL blog
• Continue to work through DRAFT - The Internet Archive’s Upload Tool - an alternative ingestion workflow aimed at acquiring content from rights holders outside of the BHL network

BHL-WIKI WORKING GROUP HIGHLIGHTS

The BHL-WIKI Working Group formally convened this month celebrating the election of a new inaugural Chair: long-time BHL advocate, and Wikimedia Laureate – 🎉🔥Siobhan Leachman 🔥🎉 Giovanna Fontenelle and JJ Dearborn will be supporting Siobhan in this exciting collaboration as Institutional Representatives and Facilitators on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation and the Biodiversity Heritage Library headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives.

Many interesting project overviews were shared at the group kick-off meeting:

• Nicole Kearney shared news of a recent grant award entitled Sharing the history of Victoria’s Regional Field Naturalists. The project will gather the rich social and natural histories of Victoria’s regional Field Naturalists Clubs to create a connected hub of knowledge.
• Andra Waagmeester shared a recent pilot that brings a diverse array of biodiversity data together through a single application Visible Nature Atlas.
• Sioban Leachman shared project updates from the Women in Genera project (https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.11.e114408) and the Research Expedition Wikimedian-in-Residence Pilot to be hosted by Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

Additional work items of note from bhl-wiki:

• Requested the BHL-TECH data flows diagram be cataloged on Figshare and dedicated CC0 https://doi.org/10.25573/data.25047434; the diagram has been uploaded to Wiki Commons, Wikidata, and Wikipedia so users can better understand the BHL data ecosystem.
• Conducted a card sort and navigation planning to inform the bhl meta-wiki presence
• Established BHL-WIKI listserv and a Telegram group to be used for group chat
• Peer reviewed the Wikimedian-in-Residence SoW
• Finalized major components of the working group charter. Feedback is still welcomed from across the consortium.

OUTREACH HIGHLIGHTS

For an overview of all BHL Outreach resources, visit https://confluence.si.edu/display/BHL/Outreach. For all public BHL promotional materials, visit https://about.biodiversitylibrary.org/about/press-room/.

Media Attention

In January, BHL and/or our collections were mentioned or used in Hakai Magazine, Snopes, The Madras Tribune, What to Expect, and Axios.

User Praise

• "Thanks to people in the @BioDivLibrary #RetroPIDs initiative, each TL-2 volume now has a dedicated DOI🥳See the summary by the link, + a file for batch-import of TL-2 into your reference manager of choice (Zotero, Mendeley, etc.)" (via @notgaudi on Twitter)
• "One of my favorite hobbies is to make the species pages of our @GuatemalaPortal look prettier with illustrations from the Biologia CA. Thank you @SILibraries and @BioDivLibrary for making it possible 🥰." (via @coleopterasam on Twitter)
• "To write this paper, the Biodiversity Heritage Library @BioDivLibrary played a fine role in providing old literature that was difficult to obtain ever, so I described it in Acknowledgments to grateful to with its URL, https://biodiversitylibrary.org." (via @Reclinervellus on Twitter)