Poster given at JCDL 2012 in

1. Collaboration & Communication
Tools used by Biodiversity Heritage Library
Refining Strategies for Success
Trish Rose-Sandler Center for Biodiversity Informatics, Missouri Botanical Garden 4344 Shaw Blvd. St. Louis, MO
Keri Thompson Smithsonian Institution Libraries NMNH, 10th and Constitution Ave NW Washington, DC
William Ulate, Center for Biodiversity Informatics, Missouri Botanical Garden 4344 Shaw Blvd. St. Louis, MO
Martin Kalfatovic Smithsonian Institution Libraries NMNH, 10th and Constitution Ave NW Washington, DC
Constance Rinaldo, Ernst Mayr Library, MCZ, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA|
BHL-Europe
Collaboration and Communication within the Organization Collaboration and Communication with Users
The Biodiversity Heritage Library is a global initiative of collaborating projects and activities User input is given equal weight as input from BHL staff and oftentimes
that seeks to digitize, preserve and make available to the world the legacy literature of users suggestions result in newly available content or user interface
biodiversity. What started as a consortium of 10 natural history, research and botanical changes within days or weeks rather than months or years. In this way
libraries in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2005 has now grown to 14 users feel they are active contributors to the BHL rather than just passive
members as of January 2012. BHL now includes collaborating projects in Europe, users of its content and become much more invested in its success and
Australia, China, Brazil, and Egypt with over40 individual institutions as members. longevity.
Adoption of collaboration tools among BHL partners, both freely available and commercial
and employment of those tools in sometimes non-traditional ways, has enabled a virtual
organization to perform as effectively as a non-virtual organization. In recognition of its
outstanding collaborative partnerships, the BHL received the Outstanding Collaboration
Citation Award in 2010 from the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services, a
division of the American Library Association.
The BHL ‘s loosely coupled
Skype US-AUS operational structure allows for
nimbleness of decision
making. As a result, BHL has
been able to respond to its
users and the needs of the
biodiversity community much
more quickly. Planning and
Feedback is solicited
consensus are achieved by informally via social media and
Skype PRC-US Skype VA-MO balancing the use of informal in person at conferences, and
Synchronous and formal, synchronous and formally via surveys and forms
Regular conference calls are communication via asynchronous tools. The same which feed into our issue
scheduled for administrative, tracking system.
Skype to global balance is sought when
technical and workflow groups in partners, often enabled
BHL-US/UK. Over 30 staff in 4 time communicating with users.
by caffeine.
Informal channels such as All data from BHL, such as OCR text, bibliographic information and
zones call in. There are also email
lists for each group. twitter enable quick responses taxonomic names are available openly for reuse and repurposing via
to requests and suggestions, API or download. Numerous projects have taken advantage of BHL’s
while formal surveys, logged open data and some have even developed applications that re-
feedback, and structured contextualize it such as the Encyclopedia of Life, BioStor and
interviews allow us to analyze Synynyms.
how BHL content and tools are BHL is now looking to
being used. incorporate such user
created or enhanced
content into our existing
BHL staff wiki use offerings to further enrich
90000 our services. In this way
80000
70000 edits the crowdsourced data
Yearly face to face technical and administrative 60000
completes an object’s
50000
meetings for global partners as well as US/UK 40000 page
members let staff get to know each other, and facilitate 30000 “digital content life cycle”
views
efficient planning, prioritizing and work distribution.
20000
10000
whose primary processes
0 include: creation,
management, discovery, BHL Australia
BHL at a glance:
2006: 10 member institutions, 42 participating staff use and reuse.
Asynchronous methods such as email,
1735 volumes, 720,000 pages online
Google docs and wikis are used to document
2012: 40 member institutions, 140+ participating staff issues and decisions and serve as an informal
106,000 volumes, 39 million pages online Putting content on flickr encourages discovery &
knowledge base for the virtual organization
re-use of images by the general public.