An overview of library types with a description of the Purposeful Gaming research project and the digitization of seed and nursery catalogs, and how research library continue to provide collections and services , but also conduct research and build digital collections.
1. Not Your Grandmother’s Library!
Marty Schlabach
Food & Agriculture Librarian
Mann Library
Cornell University
Interlaken Historical Society
April 25, 2016
2. Types of Libraries
•Public Library
• Small Towns to Large Cities
•School Library
• Elementary, Middle School, High School
•Special Library
• Museums, Hospitals, Courts, Corporations, etc.
•Academic Library
• Colleges, Universities, etc.
3. Large Collections of Strength at Cornell
• Asia Collections
• http://asia.library.cornell.edu/
• Witchcraft Collection
• http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/w/witch/
• Ethel Z. Bailey Horticultural Catalogue Collection
• http://bhort.bh.cornell.edu/catalogs.htm
4.
5. Listings of fruit and vegetables
with descriptions
Amateur's Fruit and Ornamental Trees, York, PA 1867
9. Ethel Zoe Bailey
1889-1983
• Curated the seed & nursery collection for 4+
decades, 1930s-1980s
• Daughter of Liberty Hyde Bailey
• Graduated from Smith College 1911
• Assisted her father with many of his plant
collection trips around the world
• Assisted and coauthored with her father many
of his botany and horticultural publications
• Awarded the George Robert White Medal in
1967 from the Massachusetts Historical
Society
• Awarded the Smith College Medal in 1970
• Continued curating the seed & nursery catalog
collection until her death in 1983 at the age of
93
• Lived a long and distinguished career in botany
and horticulture
10. How was it used?
1889 Introduction of
Vick’s Irondequoit Melon,
as found in
Annals of Horticulture, by LH Bailey
12. Why Digitize Seed & Nursery Catalogs?
• Taxonomists
• Discover dates of early introductions of new plants
• Gardeners
• Peruse old catalogs for historical availability and uses of traditional
cultivars of heirloom annuals and perennials
• Museums and botanical gardens
• Recreate historical gardens
• Plant breeders
• Look for descriptions of plants with unique disease and pest resistance
• Historians of art and illustration
• Drawn to the striking representations of flowers, fruit & vegetables
• Historians of printing
• Catalogs documented changes in printing
• Text-only broadsides & pamphlets
• Multipage booklets with engraved illustrations
• Colorful lithographs added
• Photographic illustrations, b&w and later color
13. Collaborative Digitization Effort
• Cornell University Library
• Liberty Hyde Bailey Hortorium (Plant Specimen Collection)
• Ethel Zoe Bailey Horticultural Catalog Collection
• 130,000+ catalogs
• New York Botanical Garden
• LuEsther T. Mertz Library
• 50,000+ catalogs
• National Agriculture Library, USDA
• Henry G. Gilbert Nursery & Seed Trade Catalog Collection
• 200,000+ catalogs
14. Cornell’s Digitization
• Public Domain items only
• i.e. no longer under copyright
• Pre-1923 American, public domain
• Post-1922 American, need research to determine
• Non-US catalogs
• different copyright laws apply
• Began scanning firms that carried grapevines
• Ethel Bailey indexed catalogs by specie & cultivated variety
(cultivar)
• Then scanned other firms not held by partners
• Funding in part provided by
• Institute for Museum & Library Services (IMLS)
15. Seed & Nursery Catalog
Digital Collection
• Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL)
• http://biodiversitylibrary.org
• Collaboration among 20+ botanical & natural history libraries
• 180,000+ volumes
• 49,000,000+ pages
• Seed & Nursery Catalog Collection
• http://biodiversitylibrary.org/browse/collection/seedcatalogs
• A subcollection in BHL
• Currently 23,000+ volumes and growing
• 1,100,000+ pages
• Combining NAL, NYBG, and Cornell digitized catalogs
19. B & W Lithography, followed by chromolithography
20. BHL Problem Statement:
• Major challenge for digital libraries:
• full-text searching of scanned texts is
significantly hampered by poor output from
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software.
• Historic literature has proven to be particularly
problematic because of its tendency to have
• varying fonts
• varying typesetting
• varying layouts
• ink bleed-through
• foxing
• other physical condition issues
21.
22. VicK's Garden and Floral Guide for 1908
GAIN it is our pleasure to send to our customers and friends a copy of
Vick's Garden and Floral Guide for 1908, trusting it will meet
with as warm a welcome as has been accorded its half-hundred pre-
decessors, and that its contents will receive as careful and discriminat-
ing attention. It has always been our policy to spare neither time nor
expense in selecting the best of Seeds ; to give our customers the best
possible for their money ; to make it a question not of price, but ot
quality ; to give a square deal and only ask a square deal in return.
Therefore, we have omitted many of the so-called novelties listed in
various catalogues, and offer for your consideration only those which
careful trials, extending over several seasons, have shown to be worthy
of a place in the 1908 edition. Among them, we ask you to note
particularly the Rochester Beet, the 20th Century Cabbage, Refugee
Wax Bean, Golden Self-Blanching Celery, Golden Nugget Sweet Corn,
Lemon Cucumber, Big Boston Lettuce, Irondequoit Muskmelon, Ailsa
Craig Onion (the finest of recent introductions), Thomas Laxton Pea, Vick's Early
Scarlet Globe Radish, Earliana Tomato. Surely this list must make you want a garden, if
only a few feet square, and the entire Specialty Colleclion can be had for $1.00, postpaid.
23.
24. • National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded to
Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis.
• Partners included
• Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology Library
• New York Botanical Garden Library
• Cornell University Library
• Ran Dec 2013-Nov 2015
• Funded in part by IMLS
Purposeful Gaming and BHL:
engaging the public in improving & enhancing
discovery & access to digital texts
25. • Built an online game to crowdsource the correction of
inaccurate OCR
• Crowdsourced the transcription of inaccurate OCR and
handwritten texts
• Added new content types upon which to test the approach
• Seed & Nursery Catalogs & Seed Exchange Lists
• Test OCR correction on this content type
• Crowd-source the transcription when needed
• Field Notebooks,
• Handwritten, OCR virtually impossible
• Crowd-source the transcription
How are we engaging the public in
improving and enhancing the discovery and access to
digital texts in BHL?
29. What happens with the game output?
• Multiple players enter the same character string for a
word, system considers it correct
• String of characters or the correct word is added to the
index
• Made available for searching & improves discoverability
30. Not your grandmother’s library!
• Libraries continue to provide collections
& services and assist users in finding
information
• But libraries also engage in research and
contribute to the development of new
digital collections and services through
special projects
31. Thanks to my colleagues at:
• Mann Library, Cornell University
• Liberty Hyde Bailey Hortorium, Cornell University
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Mertz Library, New York Botanical Garden
• Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Garden
• National Agriculture Library, USDA
• Institute for Museum and Library Services
• Tiltfactor
Public Libraries
--casual reading, books on disc, online books, children’s story time, help with school assignments, guidance on job applications or career development, family history research, and much more
School Libraries
--often separate libraries for different age groups, reading levels, grades
Special Libraries,
--less known, less public
--collections and services are narrowly focused on the special needs of the specific subject and user community
Academic Libraries
--community colleges, 4 years colleges, large universities
--collections and services in the subject areas needed by students, faculty and researchers
--may also serve a wider audience when the library’s collection is very unique and not widely duplicated at other libraries in the region or world.
Beautiful images in catalogs of the late 19th century and early 20th
Flowers
Vegetables
Fruits
Landscape plants
Perhaps more important to us as gardeners and those of us interested in horticultural history
The descriptions of vegetables, fruits and flowers
Many interests and uses of historic seed and nursery catalogs in addition
illustration & art history, printing history, landscape history,
Add fruit image
Some of you probably remember the legendary Irondequoit Muskmelon
Apparently developed and grown in the Irondequoit area
And marketed in Rochester
Great flavor, but didn’t ship well
Soon lost favor among growers, as farms became more distant from city markets
Note the price, compared to other varieties!
It must have been special and in high demand.
John A. Salzer Seed Co catalog, 1897
Example of exaggerated fruit and vegetable images
Cornell’s collection is part of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Hortorium
the plant specimen collection
founded by Liberty Hyde Bailey, noted botanist and horticulturist
Ethel Zoe Bailey Horticultural Catalogue Collection
named after Ethel Zoe Bailey (photo?)
daughter of Liberty Hyde Bailey
she was long time curator of the collection
136,000+ catalogs
earliest 1793 broadside from Prince Nursery
Massive card catalog of thousands of 3x5 cards indexing the cultivars in American and non-American catalogs
Why was a seed and nursery catalog collection compiled?
How was it used?
The bulk of the collection is stored in Mann Library, Special Collection
Who uses the catalogs now?
Relatively few large collections, to use the catalogs need to travel to one or more of those few.
Collaborative Digitization effort is under way
Probably 3 of the 4 or 5 largest catalog collections in the US
Anderson Horticultural Library, University of Minnesota
Massachusetts Horticultural Society
Note link to ‘Collection’
Chase Brothers, Rochester, NY 1891
A. Currie & Co, 1923
Explain OCR
Sample of poor OCR output from an 18th century publication.
This page is from Linneaus' Species Plantarum published in 1753
An image of the original text is on the left. The OCR is on the right
Vick’s 1908 or 1910
What does Purposeful Gaming have to do with BHL and more specifically seed and nursery catalogs??
Like reCaptcha
2 games,
1 for gamers and 1 for non-gamers
released Tuesday, June 9
Beanstalk is for non-gamers
Smorball is for gamers