1. TDWG 2006 Conference, St Louis Digitizing the legacy literature of biodiversity An introduction to the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) Neil Thomson Natural History Museum, London

2. TDWG 2006 Conference, St Louis BHL origins and objectives Encyclopedia of Life meeting at Telluride, 2003 Cost and storage possibilities Natural history literature is an ideal digitization candidate Aim: Available at point of use

3. TDWG 2006 Conference, St Louis Scope and IPR Public domain (pre-1923 in USA) Legacy literature as complement to current material Negotiation with societies and Not-For-Profits Creative Commons licensing – some rights reserved

4. TDWG 2006 Conference, St Louis Partners 10 Library partners American Museum of Natural History Field Museum Harvard University Botany Library Missouri Botanical Garden Museum of Comparative Zoology, Ernst Mayr Library National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution Natural History Museum, London New York Botanical Garden Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

5. TDWG 2006 Conference, St Louis Associates OCLC  http://www.oclc.org/ http://www.oclc.org/ Internet Archive  http://www.archive.org/index.php http://www.archive.org/index.php Others in negotiation

6. TDWG 2006 Conference, St Louis Structure & funding BHL is a f ounder member of the Open Content Alliance www.opencontentalliance.org/ Charitable status English-language project Register of intent Funding

7. TDWG 2006 Conference, St Louis Digitization phases Bibliographic record pooling Internet Archive Pod of 10 cameras Boutique scanning of rare, fragile or oversize material Metadata enhancement Service building

8. TDWG 2006 Conference, St Louis Digitization process Pooled bibliographic records used for selection, matching and status Page images and OCR Addition of identifiers Quality check Return or offsite storage

9. TDWG 2006 Conference, St Louis Metadata repository Bibliographic record pool  Monographs  Serial-titles  Article-level metadata OCLC analysis

10. TDWG 2006 Conference, St Louis Statistics - 1 Initial analysis showed:  We have 1.3 million catalogue records  73% are monographs (remainder are serials at title-level)  63% is English language material. The next most popular language (9%) is German.  About 30% of material was published before 1923.

11. TDWG 2006 Conference, St Louis Statistics - 2 Overlap analysis  Of the 981,000 monograph records from all institutions 378,000 matching pairs were found  616,000 had no matches at all and were unique to one institution.  After de-duplication of the matching pairs, the final file contains 757,000 records.

12. TDWG 2006 Conference, St Louis Metadata development Data standards  METS  DOIs  LSIDs Indexes and taxonomic intelligence

13. TDWG 2006 Conference, St Louis

14. The future What do scientists want from a digital library? What will the BHL look like?

15. TDWG 2006 Conference, St Louis http://bhl.si.edu/index.cfm