An Anatomy of a Mass Scanning Project: The Biodiversity Heritage Library. Martin R. Kalfatovic. The Medical Heritage Library Meeting. Rochester, MN. 28 April 2010

1. An Anatomy of a Mass Scanning Project
Medical Heritage Library Meeting
28 April 2010
Martin R. Kalfatovic
Smithsonian Institution Libraries

3. The Biodiversity
Heritage Library
• About BHL
• Funding
• Usage Statistics
• Growth of Content
• Outreach & Feedback
• New Developments

5. The Biodiversity
Heritage Library
American Museum of Natural
History
Field Museum
California Academy of
Sciences
Museum of Comparative
Zoology (Harvard)
New York Botanical Garden
Natural History Museum
(London)

6. The Biodiversity
Heritage Library
Smithsonian Institution Libraries
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Missouri Botanical Garden
Academy of Natural Sciences
(Philadelphia)
Marine Biological
Laboratory/WHOI
Harvard Botany Libraries

7. BHL Global

8. BHL Global

10. Funding

11. Funding
Parent
Organizations
IMLS
MacArthur
Foundation Moore
Foundation

12. Funding
2009
Direct Staff Costs $1,143,326.09
Other Costs $216,194.12
Total $1,359,520.21
Internal Subvention $150,140.00
External Grants received $775,000.00
Funds Received $925,140.00
FTE 17.69

13. Funding
2009
SI Libraries
Direct Staff Costs $376,385.14
Other Costs $52,000.00
Total $428,385.14
Internal Subvention $150,000.00
External Grants received $-
Funds Received $150,000.00
FTE 3.75

14. Some Usage Stats

15. A Global User Community

16. Steadily Increasing Usage

17. The Machine is Using
Us

Direct Traffic: 16.55%

Referring Sites: 22.20%

EOL

Wikipedia:

Tropicos

Smithsonian

BioOne

Animal Base

Search Engines: 61.15%

18. Growth of Content

19. Growth of Content

BHL

Titles: 41,387

Items: 78,872

Pages: 29.5 million

SIL

Titles: 4,535

Items: 9,563

Pages: 3.48 million

20. Growth of BHL Content
SIL 03/2009 – 03/2010

21. Outreach &
Feedback

22. Outreach &
Feedback
• Survey of users
now being
conducted
• New public “help”
wiki launched
earlier this year
• Instructional videos
for portal use being
created

24. Outreach &
Feedback
“BHL deserves so
much credit for all
that it has done to
benefit the scholarly
endeavor in such a
short amount of
time.”

25. Outreach &
Feedback
“In turn I would like to
compliment the
whole BHL team
[for] this service,
indispensable for
taxonomists (and
wider biological
community).”

26. Outreach &
Feedback
2010 ALA
Collaboration Award
“Our committee was quite
impressed with BHL's
noteworthy collaborative effort
to fulfill a scholarly need by
providing open access to a
large corpus of historical
materials on biodiversity within
the biological, ecological and
environmental sciences.”

27. Outreach &
Feedback
“Outstanding! And it is also
a great illustration of the
power of collaboration to
get things done we could
not do alone. My
congratulations to you and
all your BHL colleagues.”
- Sec. Wayne Clough

28. New Developments

29. New Developments

CiteBank for article-
level delivery in
development

Open API and web
services allow user to
create applications on
top of BHL

31. Team BHL

32. Team BHL
A Social Experiment
• Distributed scanning
• Distributed portal editing
• Distributed user services

35. THANK
YOU
An Anatomy of a Mass Scanning Project
Medical Heritage Library Meeting
28 April 2010
Martin R. Kalfatovic
Smithsonian Institution Libraries