I have a Facebook account that I ignore. I go into it about once every six months with the intention of using it, but I can never figure out its attractions, so I abandon it yet again. However, I use Twitter a lot, not to communicate so much as to keep up on the doings at institutions that interest me such as botanical gardens, herbaria, and natural history museums. Along the way, I’ve found several people and institutions posting notable items and I follow them too. For example, Donna Young (@HerbariumDonna) of the World Museum of Liverpool tweets and re-Tweets great material, as does the herbarium at St. Andrews University, Scotland (@STA_herbarium). Needless to say, in light of my last post, I also follow the Biodiversity Library, BHL (@BioDivLibrary). This is how I can keep up with its blog and all its latest endeavors. Because it’s trying to engage with as large an audience as possible, BHL communicates through a variety of social media outlets, since, like me, people have different tastes in their favorites apps. In 2016 it added Instagram and Tumblr to its internet presence along with its more longstanding Twitter and Facebook accounts. In total, it had a 76% increase in followers between 2015 and 2016, suggesting that these efforts have been successful. Perhaps its most fruitful outreach has been through Flickr where it has posted over 100,000 images from its resources, but I’ll get back to that later. I also want to note that there was a 54% increase in the number of visits to BHL from other social media sites—almost 100,000 in all, indicating users are coming to BHL from a variety of platforms. The most notable is Pinterest; posts from its accounts provided for more than half this traffic. Obviously many Pinterest users posted images sourced from BHL directly or from its Flickr account. These numbers suggest the general expansion of the social media universe and particularly of BHL’s participation in it. They also indicate its sophisticated approach to outreach.
At the moment BHL’s efforts in this area are being substantially assisted through the work of five one-year interns in the National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR) developed by the Library of Congress in conjunction with the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The five residents, now at the half-way point in their work, are at five different BHL member institutions. Pamela McClanahan at the Smithsonian Library has posted a user survey and will analyze the results, which are important to planning BHL’s future direction and where it will focus its resources. Ariadne Rehbein at the Missouri Botanical Garden has joined a Codergirl cohort in St. Louis and is also interviewing Flickr and BHL volunteer taggers about their work and how the work flows can be improved. These contributors to bettering BHL participated in a two-year grant from the NEH to develop a system for volunteers to identify and tag images in BHL volumes. This is a great example of a citizen science project where a pool of interested and committed individuals can help to enhance BHL.
At the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Marissa Kings, along with several summer interns, is creating and editing metadata for the museum’s Contributions in Science publications in preparation for uploading these and other in-house publications to BHL. She is also exploring how recently digitized museum entomology specimens and related data can be linked to the relevant literature in BHL. I have very limited experience in this area, but I know enough to realize that none of this is trivial. Having well-defined workflows and metadata can make all the difference when it comes to linking different types of data. Another intern, Alicia Esquivel at the Chicago Botanic Garden, is doing statistical analyses to estimate the size of the total amount of biodiversity literature—a difficult task to say the least. But even a rough estimate would give some idea of what percentage of that literature is now in BHL, in other words, how big its impact could be on the biodiversity research community. At Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, the fifth NDSR resident, Katie Mika is learning about adding structured bibliographic metadata in Wikidata to improve the quality of references in the Wikimedia universe and to reconcile messy data. By adding BHL IDs to Wikidata, it becomes a more robust knowledge base and improves the discoverability of BHL’s content. As you can see from these brief synopses, the NDSR program is providing BHL with expertise in several key areas and allowing it to both strengthen its foundations and move in new directions.
Before I close this post on BHL and social media, I want to get back to Flickr. BHL’s Flickr site is quite literally a joy to behold. There are now over 100,000 images from BHL content in Flickr and that number continues to rise. The contributions are arranged in albums, with each album representing one publication. For example, the album for Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, Volume 136 from 1910 has 60 images. Searching for this item in BHL will provide all these images as well as the related text, but to just enjoy the beautiful illustrations, BHL at Flickr is the way to go. All these images are copyright free and downloadable. I should note that while I gravitate to the botanical literature, Audubon’s birds are here and Gessner’s animals. Needless to say, many people stumble upon this treasure trove when they are surfing in Flickr and don’t investigate further, don’t go into BHL at all. However, some do, and that is the point of social media outreach, the more the right outlets are used, the larger the payoff.
Flickr has turned out to be an effective tool for BHL. It is also a wonderful place for a biologist to spend time on one of those days when spreadsheets and graphs make no sense and it’s easy to forget what makes biology so wonderful. Another fun way to join in is with Color Our Collections. Users can download black and white illustrations contributed by member institutions and then satisfy their urge to color them in any way they want. This project, which has become popular on the web and is continuing, grew out of a social media exchange between a librarian from the New York Academy of Medicine and a committed citizen scientist/BHL tagger from Australia—a beautiful example of BHL’s global scope (Garner, Goldberg & Pou, 2016).
Reference
Garner, A., Goldberg, J., & Pou, R. (2016). Collaborative social media campaigns and special collections: A case study on #ColorOurCollections. RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, 17(2), 100–117. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.5860/rbm.17.2.9663
Herbarium World 