The Art of Life project
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The Art of Life project aims to make natural history illustrations from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) more accessible by developing tools to identify them, applying descriptive metadata using crowdsourcing, and integrating this data back into BHL. It receives funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The project will develop an algorithm to identify illustrations, design a schema for describing them, and build a platform for users to add metadata. This will make BHL's images more discoverable and reusable for various audiences.
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The Art of Life project
- 1. The Art of Life project SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 2. What is Art of Life? • Full title - The Art of Life: Data Mining and Crowdsourcing the Identification and Description of Natural History Illustrations from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) • Grant given to Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis • Funded by National Endowment for the Humanities • Runs May 2012-April 2014 SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 3. What is BHL? • A consortium of natural history, botanical libraries and research institutions • An open access digital library for historic biodiversity literature • An open data repository of taxonomic names and bibliographic information SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 4. Member Institutions • Academy of Natural Sciences Library and Archives • American Museum of Natural History Library • California Academy of Sciences Library • Cornell University Library • The Field Museum Library • Harvard University Botany Libraries • Harvard University, Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology • Library of Congress • Marine Biological Laboratory / Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Library • Missouri Botanical Garden Library • Natural History Museum, London, Library & Archives • The New York Botanical Garden • Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Library & Archives • Smithsonian Institution Libraries • United States Geological Survey Libraries SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 5. BHL FT Staff SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 6. BHL Global SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 7. SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 8. BHL Browse SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 9. BHL Search SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 10. BHL Scientific Names SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 11. BHL Book viewer SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 12. BHL copyright and licensing Public Domain Content Files Public Domain Copyrighted Content Files Metadata, OCR, Scientific Names SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 13. BHL provides data via: • APIs • Data exports • OpenURL • OAI-PMH SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 14. Reuse of BHL data The website and webservice BioStor by Rod Page provides tools for extracting, annotating, and visualising information on literature from BHL (http://biostor.org/). In this example, Rod has identified articles found in the Proceedings of the United States National Museum. SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 15. Reuse of BHL data Ryan Schenk is using publication dates of works in BHL to build histograms of the number of publications-per-year for specific species, In this example, the Guniea Pig (http://synynyms.no.de/ ) SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 16. SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 17. Why the need for Art of Life? Problem statement – users want access to images, access to images is limited to page by page scroll or viewing selection of images in Flickr, not searchable by image content (e.g. corn, zea mays) SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 18. SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 19. 5 Primary Objectives of Art of Life Objective 1: Define an appropriate metadata schema for natural history illustrations Objective 2: Build software tools to automatically identify illustrations in the BHL corpus Objective 3: Enhance existing tools to enable the initial sorting, viewing, and editing of these identified visual resources. Objective 4: Integrate tagging applications to enable a community of users to edit descriptive metadata for the illustrations Objective 5: Integrate the descriptive metadata generated by users back into BHL portal both for access and preservation SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 20. SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 21. Current status of Art of Life • Development of the algorithm is about 90% complete and will be done by April 2013 • Draft schema for describing natural history illustrations available for public review http://tinyurl.com/9hm7nsb • Classifier tool – reusing an existing BHL tool developed by Joel Richard called Macaw http://code.google.com/p/macaw- book-metadata-tool/ SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 22. 4 algorithms that have been tested • Analysis of the scanning metadata, aka picture block data, contained within the OCR files generated as part of the Internet Archive scanning process. • Application of a technique that evaluates the vertical composition of a page by applying contrast and scaling transformations. • Analysis of the image compression ratio for scanned pages. • Analysis of color properties of scanned pages. SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 23. UI for Review of Algorithm SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 24. Art of Life Schema Needs to support three objectives: (1) to enable the discovery, description and use of the identified images by artists, biologists, humanities scholars, librarians, and educators; (2) to make BHL’s metadata and images available to other platforms; and (3) to import crowdsourced metadata generated in other platforms back into BHL. SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 25. Schema landscape review – VRA Core 4.0 (borrowed 9 elements) – LIDO – Darwin Core (borrowed 2 elements) – Dublin Core SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 26. ART OF LIFE SCHEMA ELEMENTS red =required Title Type Date Copyright Source Agent Subjects Description Inscription SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 27. Example of illustration described using Art of Life schema Title Stictospiza formosa Type Paintings Date Publication: 1898 Agent Author: Arthur G. Butler (1844-1925) Illustrator: F.W. Frohawk (1861-1946) Description A pair of finches with green and yellow bodies resting on reeds Subjects Scientific name: Amandava formosa (Latham, 1790) Vernacular Name: Green Avadavat or Green Munia Accepted Name: Amandava formosa (Latham, 1790) Birds, finches Inscriptions bottom center: Green Amaduvade Waxbill (Stictospiza formosa) Source Butler, Arthur Gardiner. Foreign finches in captivity. Hull and London: Brumby and Clarke, limited,1889 (2nd edition). This image comes from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and is available online at biodiversitylibrary.org/page/17195895 Rights Public domain SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 28. How will this project benefit libraries? • Significant resource of natural history images that will be made openly accessible and reusable. • Useful to varying audiences: artists, biologists, humanities scholars, particularly historians of science; librarians, education and outreach. Anyone who uses images in their research and teaching. • Algorithm will be made available and can be used on any text collections with OCR output. • Schema can be applied to other image collections that contain a large number of natural history illustrations. SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 29. Thanks to Art of Life team! PI Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Algorithm development Ed Bachta, Charlie Moad, Kyle Jaebker, Indianapolis Museum of Art Schema development Gaurav Vaidya and Robert Guralnick, University of Colorado, Boulder William Ulate, Missouri Botanical Garden Programming Mike Lichtenberg, Missouri Botanical Garden Consultants Doug Holland, Missouri Botanical Garden; Chris Freeland, Washington University (former PI for Art of Life) SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 30. Interested? Here’s how you can help • We welcome your feedback on the schema! http://tinyurl.com/9hm7nsb • If you know of scholars and users who would be interested in these types of images and would be interested either in participating in our survey or a brief focus groups about the schema please have them contact me trish.rose-sandler@mobot.org • Would love to talk with other folks about their experiences with crowdsourcing of metadata, particularly if you’ve used flickr or Wikimedia commons SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
- 31. For more info http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Art+of+Life Contact: tweet@trosesandler trish.rose-sandler@mobot.org SLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Art of Life project
Editor's Notes
- In 2006 libraries from botanical garden and natural history museums in the US and UK came together and decided they wanted to digitize all of the public domain literature in their collections and place them online to make them more widely accessible.One of our primary audiences are taxonomists who use BHL to find the first occurrence of name for a species in the historic literature. Also to track how that name has changed over time.
- Today there are 15 institutions who are BHL members and who contribute content to the repository. As you can see from the list its made up of some of the largest and most well known nat history and botanical garden libraries and as well as some libraries who are much broader in scope but contribute their biodiversity specific materials to the repositoryMost recent member to join is the Library of Congress
- The BHL is made up of 6 fulltime staff located at both the Smithsonian Libraries and Missouri Botanical Garden. Program Director, Martin Kalfatovic; Program Manager, Grace Costantino; and Collections Coordinator, Bianca Crowley are all based at the Smithsonian LibrariesTechnical Director, William Ulate; Programmer, Mike Lichtenberg; Data Analyst, Trish Rose-Sandler based at the Missouri Botanical GardenWe also have contributions from staff at the member institutions who allow a certain percentage of their staff time to work on BHL (when we tried to quantify how much time is spent by the part time staff it comes out to a little over 16 FTEs from the member institutions)
- What began as a consortium between libraries in the US and UK it is now increasingly a global effort – there are BHL nodes in China, Australia, Egypt, Europe, Brazil and soon to be Africa! William also heads up our global coordination efforts. Each global partner maintains its own portal that is specialized to the needs of its users but we work to share content and technology across nodes and also try to not duplicate digitization efforts so we can maximize limited scanning funding.
- The url for the portal is at biodiversitylibrary.orgHere is a sneak peak of our new UI that will go live on Monday. This new UI is a collaboration between BHL US and BHL Australia who have been maintaining separate portals but decide that based on feedback from BHL users that we should merge the 2 sites. We did a usability study in 2011 of the 2 sites and feedback indicated that Users wanted the look at feel of the Australian site but with the functionality of the US/UK site.After 6 yrs of digitization we have a critical mass of contentWe have over 57 thousand titles108 thousand volumesAlmost 40 million pages of text
- You can browse BHL by Title, Author, Date or Collection
- In our advanced search you can search on the title of a book, journal or article. You can search on Authors, Subjects and Scientific Names.
- Scientific names are a particularly critical access point for our taxonomists who need to verify the first mention of a species in the published literature as this will help them validate which is the accepted name. In this case searching on zea mays brings back all of the books and journals that have mentioned zea mays anywhere within the text. you can see it was first mentioned in 1797. Our scientific name searching is enabled by taking the OCR output from each page of digitized text and running it through TaxonFinder, a taxonomic name recognition algorithm that is maintained by uBio and which we can call up via web services
- Probably the most significant change to our UI was to the book viewer. Users now have ability to scroll multiple pages at once and to go directly to sections of the book like chapters and articles. When viewing a single page in the viewer you can see all the scientific names found on that page. The OCR can also be viewed side by side with the image of the page.
- Because one of the founding principles of BHL was to make biodiversity lit available for open access and responsible use as part of biodiversity global commons we seek to provide data in a variety of forms for other to harvest and re-use One of the keys to making data harvestable is clearly stating for your users your copyright and licensing terms are so that they know what they can and cannot do with your data. Because most of our books and journals are historic literature that were published between 1450s- and 1923 they fall within the public domain - users may reuse them for either commercial or non-commercial purposes w/o permission. We do have some copyrighted material that we’ve digitized with the permission of the publisher. Those we provide under a Creative Commons Attribution/Non-Commercial/Share Alike License Our metadata (which includes catalog records and scientific names ) are available under a CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license. Which essentially says we are the creaters of the data and want to dedicate it to the public domain. This allows anyone to reuse, modify, repurpose, and distribute the metadata for all purposes including commercial and non-commercial, with no need to ask for permission. This follows in the footsteps of other libraries such as The British Library, Europeana, the University of Michigan Library, and Harvard who have adopted it for their online catalog data.
- Therefore we provide data in a variety of exportsWe encourage digital library aggregators to incorporate our records into their portals and library catalogs. We provide data in ways that it can be mined recontextualized
- Besides the traditional harvesting of our metadata records into other portals such as OCLC WorldcatAnd Digital Public Library of America our content has been mined and recontextualized for a variety of interesting purposes. The website and webservice BioStor by Rod Page provides tools for extracting, annotating, and visualising information on literature from BHL (http://biostor.org/). In this example, Rod has identified articles found in the Proceedings of the United States National Museum. We are now incorporating Rod’s articles back into the BHL portal and they will be searchable in the new UI. So here’s an example of how making your data open accessible could result in real benefits back to your institution and users
- Ryan Schenk is using publication dates of works in BHL to build histograms of the number of publications-per-year for specific species, In this example, the Guniea Pig (http://synynyms.no.de/ )
- Another key to harvestable is promotion. People won’t know your data is out there and can be mined unless you advertise and really get the word out. We also make extensive use of social media to let users know about new content, contextualize the existing content, interact with users and in general let users know we are a constantly dynamic and growing repository. We do this via: our Blog, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.
- So all of this background information was provided in order to give context as to the need for the Art of Life project. Problem Statement- Art of Life evolved out of a need in the BHL that was expressed by our users. We had a critical mass of content online, BHL users knew there were amazing images within the BHL pages but there was no easy way to find them other than opening up a BHL book or volume and scrolling through page by page to find illustrations. There is no descriptive metadata attached to the illustration that would tell you the content of the image, date when they were created or who was involved in their creation.
- One way we’ve tried to address this need is by pushing selected images to Flickr. We have created a BHL account in Flickr and pushed over 63,000 images so far but but this is all a very manual process that takes considerable staff time. We estimate that we have millions of illustrations within BHL so this manual process does not scale well
- This is the Art of Life workflow diagram which identifies the 4 processes the illustrations will go through as they move through each stage of the workflow. They include: Extract, Classify, Describe, and Share.The Extract stage is where BHL pages will be run through an algorithm to identify which pages contain illustrations, whether they be full plates or only a section of the page. This algorithm is being developed by our partners on the project from the Indianapolis Museum of Art Lab. At the Classify stage, the pages with illustrations will be tagged by Art of Life staff as being one or several broad types such as drawing/painting, photograph, diagram and even map. The tool we will use for this is actually an existing tool created at the Smithsonian Libraries called Macaw that BHL uses to for books scanned outside of its traditional workflow.For the Describe stage, the illustrations will be pushed into platforms such as Flickr and Wikimedia Commons where both the general public and specialists can describe them in much greater detail such as adding a title, creator, date (if different from date of publication), and subjects. Wikimedia Commons is where the schema can play a role. Because Wikimedia allows you to create templates we can provide guidance to taggers on what information to record and how to record it. In the Share stage, the metadata for the illustrations will be reingested back into the BHL portal for searching there. And of course we want to be able to preserve any contributed metadata from external platforms. We also want to broaden the audience for these illustrations because we believe they have a wide appeal to artists, biologists, humanities scholars, particularly historians of science; librarians, education and outreach. Many of the audiences don’t know about BHL and won’t go to the BHL platform looking for the content so we want to push the illustrations out to environments where they already are: Encyclopedia of Life, ARTstor, and even ITunes.
- IMA developed a UI for us to review the results of each algorithm. This screen shot just shows results from the OCR files (ABBY) and contrast. Those were the 2 algorithms we found to be most accurate. Its showing you all the pages in a book, how many actual illustrations and how many true/false postitives. The actual illustrations is based on a gold standard testset that we developed where we’ve manually gone and identified which pages have images so the algorithm can always compare against the test set and come up with a percentage of accuracy.
- We ended up choosing most of the schema elements from the VRA Core because its elements and attributes were mostly closely aligned with the types of information we felt were important to record. But also because its relationship of works linking to one or more images fit nicely with the BHL pages often containing one or more illustrations on a single page. The only thing the VRA Core lacked was a way to record an acceptedName and CommonName for a species. VRA Core has a subject attribute type of scientificName but Taxonomists would be interested in knowing the multiple names by which species are known. Darwin Core was able to fulfill this need and so we borrowed 2 elements from that schema.
- Here are the elements chosen (this is still in draft form)
- Here is an illustration described using the schema