Imagine the great library of life, the library that Charles Darwin said was necessary for the “cultivation of natural science” (1847). And imagine that this library is not just hundreds of thousands of books printed from 1500 to the present, but also the data contained in those books that represents all that we know about life on our planet.
That library is the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) The Internet Archive has provided an invaluable platform for the BHL to liberate taxonomic names, species descriptions, habitat description and much more. Connecting and harnessing the disparate data from over five-centuries is now BHL’s grand challenge. generated at the point of digitization phone number database holds immense untapped potential. Tim Berners-Lee provided the world with a semantic roadmap to address this global deluge of dark data and Wikidata is now executing on his vision. As we speak, BHL’s data is undergoing rapid transformation from legacy formats into linked open data, fulfilling the promise to evaporate data silos and foster bioliteracy for all humankind.
Martin R. Kalfatovic (BHL Program Director and Associate Director, Smithsonian Library and Archives) and JJ Dearborn (BHL Data Manager) will explore how books in BHL become data for the larger biodiversity community.
Watch the video:
Lightning Talks
In this final session of the Internet Archive’s digital humanities expo, Library as Laboratory, you’ll hear from scholars in a series of short presentations about their research and how they’re using collections and infrastructure from the Internet Archive for their work.