Tom Garnett April 12, 2007 Smithsonian Institution Libraries National Museum of Natural History Board Science Committee Meeting Biodiversity Heritage Library

Tom GarnettApril 12, 2007

Smithsonian Institution LibrariesNational Museum of Natural History Board Science Committee Meeting

Biodiversity Heritage Library

Tom Garnett

Smithsonian Institution Libraries



Taxonomic Literature

• Over 250 years of systematic description of life

• Systema naturae (10th ed. 1758) by Carl von Linné



The cited half-life of publications in taxonomy is longer than in any other scientific discipline

* * * The decay rate is longer than in any scientific discipline

- Macro-economic case for open access, Tom Moritz




Taxonomic Impediment

• Specimen collections• Databases• Publications• Observations• ‘Gray’ literature• Index cards• Field notebooks



• 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 information, is promoted

- Darwin Declaration, 1998

The essential requirements for accessing and utilising this global information are:




Taxonomic Impediment

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

US & Canada Europe Mexico & C.America

SouthAmerica

Biologia Centrali-Americana. Edited by Frederick Ducane Godman and Osbert Salvin. London : Pub. for the editors by R. H. Porter, 1879-1915



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

Digital Divide?



Biodiversity Heritage Library• 2003, Telluride. Encyclopedia of Life

meeting• February 2005. London. Library and

Laboratory: the Marriage of Research, Data and Taxonomic Literature

• May 2005. Washington. Ground work for the Biodiversity Heritage Library

• June 2006. Washington. Organizational and Technical meeting

• August 2006. New York Botanical Garden. BHL Director’s Meeting.

• October 2006. St. Louis/San Francisco. Technical meetings

• February 2007. Museum of Comparative Zoology. Organizational meeting



Biodiversity Heritage Library• American Museum of Natural History

(New York)• Field Museum (Chicago)• Natural History Museum (London)• Smithsonian Institution (Washington) • Missouri Botanical Garden• New York Botanical Garden• Royal Botanic Garden, Kew• Botany Libraries, Harvard University• Ernst Meyer Library of the Museum of

Comparative Zoology, Harvard University

• Marine Biological Laboratory / Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution






• Core literature pre-1923: 400,000 (80 million pages)

• All pre-1923: 600-750,000 (120-150 million pages)

• All literature: 1.4-1.6 million (280-320 million pages)




View





9. Page View















Internet Archive Scribe Scanner

• Single Scribe Machine– Human operated– 200 volumes per

shift per week– ~ 70,000 pages from

a single machine per week
















Documents

Tom Garnett April 12, 2007 Smithsonian Institution Libraries National Museum of Natural History Board Science Committee Meeting Biodiversity Heritage Library