Crowd-sourcing the creation of “articles” within the Biodiversity Heritage Library Bianca Crowley Trish Rose-Sandler
The BHL is… A consortium of 13 natural history, botanical libraries and research institutions An open access digital library for legacy biodiversity literature. An open data repository of taxonomic names and bibliographic information An increasingly global effort BHL LITA 2011
Problem: Books vs. Articles Librarians manage booksUsers need articles BHL LITA 2011
Solution: “Article-ization” Creating articles manually, through the help of our users: BHL PDF Generator Creating articles through automated means: BioStor BHL LITA 2011 Page, R. (2011). Extracting scientific articles from a large digital archive: BioStor and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. BMC Bioinformatics, 12(187). Retrieved from
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Create-your-own PDF BHL LITA 2011
Citebank today: BHL LITA 2011
What is an “article” anyway? BHL LITA 2011
the Good, the Bad, the Ugly BHL LITA 2011
the Good, the Bad, the Ugly BHL LITA 2011
the Good, the Bad, the Ugly BHL LITA 2011
Questions for Data Analysis What is the quality, or accuracy, of user provided metadata? What kinds of content are users creating? How can we improve the PDF generator interface? BHL LITA 2011
Stats Jan 2010-Apr 2011 –Approx 60,000 pdfs created from PDF Generator –40% of those (approx 24,000) were ingested into CiteBank (PDFs without user-contributed metadata excluded) 5 reviewers analyzed 945 pdfs (approx 3.9% of the 24,000+ articles going into Citebank) **Thanks to reviewers Gilbert Borrego, Grace Costantino, and Sue Graves from the Smithsonian Institution BHL LITA 2011
Methodological approach Quantitative – numerical rating system Rated titles, authors, beg/end pages Its “findability” within CiteBank search often determined how it was rated BHL LITA 2011
Ratings System Title 1=has all characters in title letter for letter 2=does not have all characters in title letter for letter but still findable in CiteBank search 3= does not have all characters in title letter for letter and is NOT findable via the CiteBank search LITA 2011 BHL
Ratings System Author 1=has all characters in author(s) last name letter for letter 2=has at least one author’s last name spelled correctly 3=has no authors or none of the author’s last names are spelled correctly LITA 2011 BHL
Ratings System Article beginning & ending pages 1=has all text pages for an article, from start to end 2=subset of pages from a larger article 3=a set of pages where the intellectual content has been compromised. LITA 2011 BHL
Analysis steps LITA 2011
Results Title average 1.68 Title average1.68 Author(s) average1.33 Beg/End pg average1.41 Title & Author average1.50 Overall average (combines first 3 above) 1.47 LITA 2011 BHL
What did we learn? Ratings were better than we expected Many users took the time to create decent metadata “good enough” is not great but is still “findable” LITA 2011 BHL
BHL-Australia’s new portal there’s always room for improvement Other factors But of course….. BHL LITA 2011
Changes we made for UI so far Asking users if they want to contribute their article to CiteBank Making article title a required field and validating it so its at least 2 or more characters Review button for users to review page selections and metadata (inspired by BHL- AUS) Reduced text and increased more intuitive graphics (inspired by BHL-AUS) BHL LITA 2011
Brief survey of proposed changes Overwhelmingly positive response to proposed change there’s always room for improvement But of course….. BHL LITA 2011
Success Factors Monitor the creation of the metadata to look at user behavior and patterns Engage with your users Incentivize your users LITA 2011
@BioDivLibrary /pages/Biodiversity-Heritage-Library/ /photos/biodivlibrary/sets/ /group/biodiversity-heritage-library Bianca Crowley Trish Rose-Sandler trish.rose- BHL LITA 2011