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July 2024 BHL Monthly Highlights

Save the Date for 2025 BHL Annual Meeting! We are so pleased to announce that BHL Member Museum für Naturkunde (MfN) Berlin will be hosting our annual meeting in Berlin from April 7-11, 2025. Stay tuned for additional details later this year.

BHL welcomed Jane Quigley as the new BHL Member Representative for the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives (SLA). Jane is the Head Librarian at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History Library. SLA Director Tamar Evangelestia-Dougherty is currently on extended leave. Liza Kirwin, Deputy Director Emerita of the Archives of America Art, has been named Acting Director.

Presentations

On 9 July, Nicole Kearney and Jack Eastaugh presented “Capturing the history of Victoria’s Field Naturalists” at the VALA Libraries, Technology and the Future 2024 conference in Melbourne, Australia.

On 22 July, Martin Kalfatovic organized Botanical Contributions from the Biodiversity Heritage Library at the XX International Botanical Congress in Madrid, Spain. Speakers included:

• Martin Kalfatovic - Data for botany: unlocking the world of plants in BHL
• Nicole Kearney - BHL Australia: unlocking the foundation of Australia’s botanical knowledge
• Carmen Ulloa - Amplifying the contribution of women to botany: an analysis of plant genera that were named after women
• David Iggulden - Right on Kew: BHL at the Royal Botanic Gardens
• Abdeldjalil Aissi - Quercus faginea Lam. s.l. in North Africa, an ongoing taxonomic challenge
• Michael Trizna - Matching herbarium specimens with Mary Vaux Walcott watercolor paintings using machine learning and detective work

Did you give a presentation in July 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

• 71 new tickets added to our Gemini Issue Tracking system
• 60% of these tickets, or 43, were added by BHL Staff
• 73 tickets were closed -- thank you for resolving outstanding Gemini tickets as you can.
• 3,687 tickets remain open in our system

COLLECTIONS HIGHLIGHTS

Top Contributors in July by Page Count

1. Boston Public Library 14,032
2. Smithsonian Libraries and Archives 13,887
3. South African National Biodiversity Institute 11,720
4. Cornell University Library 11,107
5. Internet Archive 4,880

82,972 Total Pages contributed to BHL in July
↑ from 68,917 pages in the previous month and > our new monthly average of 81,216 pages

The BHL Collections Committee

• Continued to make progress on retrospectively adding Rights Holder (RH) names to the BHL database. The addition of these names helps provide appropriate credit to the rights holders that have granted permission to BHL to include in-copyright items in its collection. The committee anticipates completing this task next month.
• Began collecting questions and concerns about the potential prospect of BHL as a publishing platform via a padlet to help structure its discussions going forward. The purpose of this discussion is to provide BHL Secretariat and EC with information to inform BHL’s strategic direction in the future.
• Reviewed final tweaks to virtual items display for BHL user interface. As most BHL article metadata lacks abstract information, the committee decided that abstract indexing – for the Pensoft articles that have abstracts – is a nice-to-have wishlist item.
• The new BHL Permissions workspace, PERM, now contains 225 titles, with 108 titles that are either unclaimed or a request for help has been submitted to a BHL partner. 92 titles of this total are e-content uploads in the UPLD workspace. Please review these PERM titles with priority, thank you!

CATALOGING AND METADATA COMMITTEE HIGHLIGHTS

• Audit unused MARC data in the import database

The Cataloging Committee began reviewing unharvested MARC fields for metadata relevant to BHL. Fields under consideration for ingest include 016, 222, 247, 760, 762, 800 , 810, and 811. The Committee intends to make final decisions during next month’s meeting.

• OCLC error report - metadata clean up

The Committee reviewed OCLC error reports in an effort to identify and rectify data integrity issues, which will help ensure the clean delivery of high quality MARCXML to ShareVDE. The Committee flagged cleanup tasks that could be completed by BHL partners, while errors associated with non-partner institutions were marked “won’t fix.”

• ChatGPT for creating MARCXML records from meta.xml

There are many items in IA that lack MARC records and thus have not been harvested by BHL. The Committee has begun strategizing possible solutions, which include using ChatGPT to create MARCXML records from meta.xml. The plan is to develop a Research Spike that will consider prompts for archival materials, quality assurance, ethical implications, and more.

• GEMINI tickets

The Committee reviewed and closed several Gemini tickets related to typos and title merges, including a ticket created in 2010!

PERSISTENT IDENTIFIER WORKING GROUP (PIWG) HIGHLIGHTS

Total new BHL DOIs for July: 3,076

Total new BHL segments for July: 3,288
In July, the PIWG uploaded content and article metadata for:

• Journal of the New York Botanical Garden (1,376 articles; title is now approximately 50% complete)
• Mycotaxon (1,138 articles, all with external DOIs)
• Journal of South African Botany (203 articles, via AI)
• Doriana (151 articles, via AI)
• Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature (10 articles added, others cleaned)
• Arnoldia - checked 1483 articles; 539 articles edited, 113 articles added; 1501 new DOIs added
• Index Rafinesquianus (1949) - scanned and DOI assigned to title
• Opuscula Philolichenum Uploaded 22 volumes (2004-2023). Added 260 articles. Assigned 252 DOIs
• Yuccas of the southwestern United States (1938-1947). Scanned 2 volumes and assigned DOI.

TECHNICAL TEAM HIGHLIGHTS

• Modified the sort order used to display segments in the "See Also" section of the part landing page
• Added support for External Resources to Segments
• Improved navigation delivery for Virtual items on the front-end
• Added prominent links to the BHL Feedback Form on the BHL Website, About site, and Blog site
• Now routing Scan Requests from BHL User Feedback to the SCAN project in Gemini
• Rewrote virtual items code to use crossref API for more structured and robust metadata retrieval
• Began development of a citation “widget” to be added to the title, segment, and book viewer landing pages
• BHL Tech had a mid-year Cycle Review 2024 to discuss past performance and future technical priorities remaining

BHL-WIKI WORKING GROUP HIGHLIGHTS

• A BHL-WIKI GitHub project board has been set up for the group to track work, milestones, metrics and scholarly outputs related to the group charge. If you would like access to this board, please send your GitHub handle to JJ and look for an automated email granting access to your email. For more information about GitHub projects please consult the documentation. We will go over github project management tools at the August meeting.
• A Request for Interest message was disseminated regarding the BHL Wikimedian-in-Residence position with an amazing turnout of qualified candidates. Interviews, informational sessions, and final evaluation are being overseen by Wikiblueprint
• In anticipation of further curation work to happen on BHL images, the group continues to work through the Flickypedia documentation.
• The group is working to finalize a hypothesis statements for WMG annual planning Please come to the August monthly meeting to inform this important conversation.
• Giovanna Fontenelle has submitted a conference abstract for WikiConference North America 2024 entitled How to create Wikimedia Working Groups for GLAMs
• Siobhan Leachman is attending and will be presenting on biodiversity wiki activities at the following events:
• International Botanical Congress (IBC) 2024 (21-27 July 2024, Madrid, Spain)
• Wikimania 2024 the 19th Wikimedia conference, (7–10 August 2024., Katowice, Poland)

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/.
User Praise

• "I have seen so much content that must be from @BioDivLibrary at #IBC2024, but BHL is rarely acknowledged as the source. But perhaps this just means that BHL integrates seamlessly & invisibly into the interlinked network of scholarly research online. #JobDone" (via @nicolekearney on Twitter)

↪️”BHL is to biodiversity as plumbing is to modern comforts.. things are worse without it. Same applies for taxonomy and the rest of biology.” (via @gjolleyrogers on Twitter)

• "@BioDivLibrary is one of the coolest resources ever! If you have checked it out, you should." (via @jbwallingford on Twitter)