Collaborating locally, contributing globallyThe Biodiversity Heritage Library in Australia

Elycia Wallis & Dave Matthews@elyw

Introduction

• Why literature is important to taxonomy

• Biodiversity Heritage Library global consortium

• BHL-Australia and the Atlas of Living Australia

• Future plans

Context: museum libraries

Hidden away

Platypus see Ornithorhynchus

John Gould (1863) The Mammals of Australia

The Naturalist's Miscellany: Or, Coloured Figures Of Natural Objects; Drawn and Described Immediately From Nature (1789-1813)

Literature and taxonomy

Theodore Roosevelt, 1910, African Game Trails: an account of the African wanderings of an American hunter-naturalist. http://bhl.ala.org.au/bibliography/20032#/summary

Taxonomy is a dynamic science

Supergiant amphipod caught in the Kermadec Trench off New Zealand. Photo copyright of Oceanlab, University of Aberdeen, UK. http://www.niwa.co.nz/news/%E2%80%98supergiant%E2%80%99-amphipods-discovered-7-kilometres-deep

Electronic publishing

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110720/full/news.2011.428.html?s=news_rss

http://cunabulum.blogspot.com/2011/07/botanists-vote-to-allow-online.html

Biodiversity Heritage Library

BHL: extensive, open, global

Goals• To digitise biological literature• To create a global partnership• To engage the research community

Principles• Open access = free• Open content = public domain or with permission of

copyright holders• Collaborative = local collaborations as well as global• Shared development = learning from others

Origins of BHL

• Academy of Natural Sciences (Philadelphia)

• American Museum of Natural History

• Field Museum• Marine Biological Laboratory

(WHOI) (Woods Hole)• Museum of Comparative

Zoology (Harvard)• Smithsonian Institution

Libraries • Natural History Museum

(London)• Harvard Botany Libraries • Missouri Botanical Garden• New York Botanical Garden• Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew)

Encyclopedia of Life

Encyclopedia of Life

And so they started scanning...

The numbers tell the story

November 2011

Global BHL

• Nodes in Europe, China, Brazil, Egypt and Australia

Social

“Global data sharing requires a social infrastructure”Martin Kalfatovic

Best facilitated face to face

Biodiversity Heritage Library in Australia

BHL-Australia

Background• BHL-Au is the literature service for the Atlas of

Living Australia

MissionTo develop an authoritative, freely accessible, distributed and federated biodiversity data management system

www.ala.org.au

The Council of Heads of Australian Faunal Collections (CHAFC)

The Council of Heads of Australian Entomological Collections (CHAEC)

The Council of Heads of Australasian Collections of Microorganisms (CHACM)

The Council of Australasian Museum Directors (CAMD)

BHL-Australia

Goals• To provide a digital literature

service for the ALA• To participate in the global

BHL partnership• To manage a BHL-Au website,

including development of new functionality

• To develop a bid list for new digitisation

• To undertake new scanning projects

http://bhl.ala.org.au

Bid list

New scanning

Macaw

Photographer: Beatrice Murch Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ara_ararauna_-Blue-and-yellow_Macaw_in_a_tree.jpg

Future plans

Species page

Links to articles

New tools

The images are wonderful

Hot off the presses

Thank-you