Smithsonian Libraries Partnering in Research

Smithsonian Institution Libraries:Partnering In Research

Smithsonian Institution LibrariesSuzanne C. Pilsk

With the Help from a Whole Host of Others

Smithsonian Institution

African ArtAfrican American History and CultureAnthropologyAmerican ArtAmerican HistoryAsian and Middle Eastern ArtAviation history and Space FlightDesign and Decorative ArtsEnvironmental Management and

Ecology

History of Science and TechnologyLatino History and CultureMaterials ResearchModern and Contemporary ArtMuseologyNative American History and Culture Natural HistoryPostal HistoryTropical BiologyTrade LiteratureWorld’s Fair Ephemera

Smithsonian Institution Libraries

Support for the Sciences Taxonomic Nomenclature

Identifying and Naming of Species– New, Old, Re-name, Misspellings,

Synonyms, Homonyms, Splits, Joins, …– Authorship: Who, When, Former, …

Rules:International Code of Botanical NomenclatureInternational Code of Zoological NomenclatureInternational Code of Nomenclature of Bacteria

Importance of Publication

Who Writes Publishes

and Distributes FIRST

WINS

Justification of NH Libraries!

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.

Charles Davies Sherborn, Epilogue to Index Animalium, March 1922

Libraries and Librarians

Metadata Fail

Tools of the Trade

Index Animalium

Taxonomic Literature 2nd Ed.

How to make THIS into 1’s and 0’s

Digitization

Metadata Successes

The Squire

Connecting Index to Sources

Bibliography = Metadata

Lost… Just Lost

"362382","SIL34_02_24_0193","6101","splendens Turdus, W. E. Leach, Zool. Miscell. II. 1815, 30.”

ID Image ID Page Name & reference

Database Parsing To Find Pieces and Parts

Taxonomic Literature 2nd Edition

Taxonomic Literature: A selective guide to botanical publications and collections with dates, commentaries and types (second edition)

15 volumes guide to the literature of systematic botany published between 1753 and 1940

Organized by author ~ Citation for the author’s surname

Numbered entries of the author’s publications ~ Suggested short-title & abbreviation of short-title for use in taxonomic publications

TL2 is a standard by which author’s names and titles should be abbreviated

Digitizing The Entire Title:Scope of Work

• Approximately 11, 500 scanned pages

• Average of 3,300 characters per page

• Approximately 44, 000 author entries

• Image files approx. 9 GB in size

★ Linked Open Data – 5 Stars ★

★ Available on the web (whatever format), but with an open licence ★★ Available as machine-readable structured data (e.g. excel instead of image scan of a table)

★★★ as (2) plus non-proprietary format (e.g. CSV instead of excel)

★★★★ All the above plus, Use open standards from W3C (RDF and SPARQL) to identify things, so that people can point at your stuff

★★★★★ All the above, plus: Link your data to other people’s data to provide context

• Shareable• Extensible• Re-Usable• International

TL2: Linked Open DataBotanist Pages

Triple stores of Name relationship to BooksTriple stores of Name relationship to Standard Abbreviation

Book PagesTriple stores of Book relationship to NameTriple stores of Book relationship to TL2 numberingTriple stores of Book relations to Standard Abbreviation

http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/

Future

Life and Literature Conference 2011

Life and Literature Conference 2011

Life and Literature Conference 2011

Elycia Wallis, Museum Victoria

Compelling Use Cases for DigitizationIncluding cool and unexpected

Once digitized, text is just textSignificant amount not discoverable

“So in not fully investigating the product of the digital projects, are we selling scholarship short? What scholarship in the digital age means? And what are the real tools we need to do it?”

Thanks To Many• Joel Richard• Martin Kalfatovic• Grace Costantino• Courtney Shaw• Keri Thompson• Interns too numerous to

name• Volunteers too numerous to

name

• Robin Everly• Gilbert Borrego• Carolyn Sheffield• Bianca Crowley • Becky Morin• Mike Lichtenburg• David Remsen• Patrick Leary• Chris Freeland

Contact information: PilskS@si.edu

Interesting SourcesIndex Animalium http://www.sil.si.edu/digitalcollections/indexanimalium/Taxonomic Literature (3) www.sil.si.edu/digitalcollections/tl-2

Smithsonian Institution Librarieswww.sil.si.edu/digitalcollections/tl-2

Connecting Contentresearch.calacademy.org/library/fieldnotes

The Field Book Projectwww.mnh.si.edu/rc/fieldbooks/index.html

Linked Open Datalinkeddata.org/

Life and Literature Conferencehttp://www.lifeandliterature.org/

Smithsonian Institutionwww.si.edu/

Biodiversity Heritage Librarywww.biodiversitylibrary.org/

Internet Archivewww.archive.org/