Life and Literature Speaker Presentations: Closing Remarks from Director Tom Garnett

What does Indra's Net, a metaphor from the Buddhist text Avatamsaka Sutra, have to do with the Biodiversity Heritage Library? Find out in BHL Director Tom Garnett's closing remarks from the Life and Literature Conference! Furthermore, get a brief glimpse of BHL from the director's perspective, including an estimate of the total amount of core biodiversity taxonomic literature scanned by BHL to-date (33% pre-1923 texts and 7% total), a vision of BHL for the future, and a rallying call to all those involved in biodiversity digitization, research, or simply those who have an interest in biodiversity at large, i.e. everyone. With such encouraging remarks for the future, how can we doubt that BHL will continue to be an ambitious project that will successfully meet the variant needs of a wide and dispersed user community?

Life and Literature Speaker Presentations: Abel Packer

Today we feature the presentation by Abel Packer, leader of the implementation of the BHL-SciELO project in Brazil.

Panel 2: Publishers, Aggregators, and Authors

Panelist: Abel Packer

Presentation Title: "SciELO: Scientific Electronic Library Online"

Mr. Packer's presentation described the SciELO project, which indexes and publishes 800+ peer-reviewed scientific journals, serving 1 million+ article downloads per day. It provides enhancements to journals by publishing them on the Web in national and thematic collections under the open access model, with access to full text also provided. The presentation discusses what has worked in the process of developing and implementing open access projects, what the problems are and why, and next steps for open access projects, with emphasis on which avenues will benefit the scholarly communications community.

Life and Literature Speaker Presentations: Catriona MacCallum

Meet Catriona MacCallum, senior editor of PLoS Biology and consulting editor of PLoS One. She is our third featured presenter from the Publishers, Aggregators and Authors panel.

Panel 2: Publishers, Aggregators, and Authors

Panelist: Catriona MacCallum

Presentation Title: "PLoS: Public Library of Science"

PLoS, or the Public Library of Science, is the world's largest not-for-profit open access publisher. One of their journals, PLoS One, practices innovations in the areas of editorial criteria and review. Her presentation outlines these innovations and some important considerations for assessing impact.

Life and Literature Speaker Presentations: Dr. Lyubo Penev

Meet Dr. Lyubo Penev, the establisher and developer of Pensoft, one of the leading academic publishers specializing in biodiversity science and natural history.

Panel 2: Publishers, Aggregators, and Authors

Panelist: Lyubo Penev

Presentation Title: "The Pensoft Journal System and XML-Based Workflow"

During his presentation, Dr. Penev highlighted the many innovations and challenges that have faced the Pensoft project since its debut. Pensoft claims a digital publishing platform, tools for automated extraction and dissemination of published content, tools for web crawling and linking of published content to external sources, and Zookeys, a revolutionary open-access journal, among its achievements. Dr. Penev also outlined three areas that he believes should be an important part of BHL's mission and future. These include:

• becoming a true archive of both historical and recently published biodiversity literature
• continued pursuit of Citebank
• a closer collaboration between Citebank, Mendeley, ViBRANT's Bibliography of Life, libraries and publishers for article-level metadata exchange, de-duplication, and reconciliation

Life and Literature Speaker Presentations: Jan Reichelt

A fan of Mendeley, perhaps? Well, if so, you're in luck, for today we feature the presentation from Mendeley co-founder Jan Reichelt, the first of our featured presenters from the Publishers, Aggregators, and Authors panel.

Panel 2: Publishers, Aggregators, and Authors

Panelist: Jan Reichelt

Presentation Title: "Mendeley Research Networks: Life and Literature Conference"

Jan Reichelt is the co-founder and president of Mendeley, the world's largest research collaboration platform, and the world's largest crowd-sourced research database with 100 million uploaded documents. The presentation describes Mendeley and outlines how the project helps scientists and researchers all over the world collaborate and gain access to millions of vital research papers. As Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, relates, "I strongly believe that Mendeley can change the face of science."

Life and Literature Speaker Presentations: Sandra Knapp

Wondering what other presenters had to say at the Research, Informatics, and the Public Record panel after seeing the last two by Elycia Wallis and Donat Agosti? Well then, you're in luck! Today we feature the presentation by Dr. Sandra Knapp!

Panel 1: Research, Informatics, and the Published Record
Panelist: Sandra Knapp
Presentation Title: "Research, Informatics, and the Published Record: Life, the Universe, and Everything"

Dr. Knapp, a specialist on the taxonomy of the nightshade family, Solanaceae, is the author of more than 150 peer-reviewed papers and several books. Her presentation discussed the functions of publication and the multitude of new resources available that allow scientists to link to literature, specimen images, taxonomic information, and species descriptions, thus taking scientific work to a whole new level. She also discussed some interesting statistics, such as the fact that most people still decide where to publish their work based on the reputation of the journal, not the availability, or lack thereof, of epub versions of those journals. She also discussed that many scientists today, with an overload of articles and information, cite articles within their own work for which they have only read the abstract.

Life and Literature Speaker Presentation: Janet Browne

Today we feature the final presentation from the Humanities panel at the Life and Literature conference. Take a look at Janet Browne's presentation, entitled "Illustrations as Substitute Specimens."

Panel 4: Building Collaborative Networks for Science and the Humanities through Scientific Literature

Panelist: Janet Browne

Presentation Title: "Illustrations as Substitute Specimens"

Janet Browne is Aramont professor of the History of Science at Harvard University where she teaches the history of biology. She has authored a two-volume biography of Charles Darwin and is currently working on a cultural history of the gorilla. Her presentation discussed how, particularly in the early days of natural history science, illustrations of specimens often served as the only representation of those species that the public and other scientists could reference. Indeed, one of the earliest drawings of a Mastodon skeleton portrayed the tusks as curving inwards rather than outwards, thus resulting in the belief that this was in fact how the animal looked in life.

Life and Literature Speaker Presentations: Richard Pyle

How did we kick off the Life and Literature conference? With a presentation by plenary speaker Dr. Richard Pyle. And now we're sharing that presentation with you!

Plenary Speech 1
Speaker: Richard Pyle
Presentation Title: "A Brief History of Everything that Really Matters"

Dr. Pyle is an expert in the taxonomy and bio-geography of coral-reef fishes and a commissioner of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. Within his presentation, he described taxonomy both as the "perpetual reclassification of mis-named species" and "a necessary evil." Highlighting the good, the bad, and the ugly of taxonomy, Dr. Pyle illustrated that one of the greatest obstacles facing taxonomic science today is the fact that there are a multitude of different names for the same species, and even different species which have been given the same name. Furthermore, when it comes to zoologists and botanists, there are a great many impediments to effective communication between the two groups, as each have different meanings for the same vocabulary. To overcome these obstacles, he argues that we need to build a global names architecture, and take advantage of existing GUIDs.

Photos Galore!

Even if you couldn't make it to the Life and Literature conference, we've tried to bring as much of the conference to you as we could, publishing speaker presentations, conference notes and discussions, and even attendee interviews to this site. But if all of this doesn't satiate your appetite, today we've posted pictures from the event. The next best thing to being there in person, these pictures, provided by R. Paul Skeehan (Flickr Profile Skee 2), allow you to get a first-person perspective on the conference. So, whether you couldn't make it to the conference, or if you did and are pining for the two days of intense BHL partying ;-), we've got the pictures to bring it all to life again!

Above: Second Plenary Speaker George Dyson delivering his presentation "Darwin Among the Machines"

Life and Literature Speaker Presentations: Donat Agosti

Today we feature the presentation from another of our speakers from the Research, Informatics, and the Published Record panel: Dr. Donat Agosti.

Panel 1: Research, Informatics, and the Published Record
Panelist: Donat Agosti
Presentation Title: "The Future"

Dr. Agosti, a specialist on the taxonomy of ants, is heavily involved in the conservation of biodiversity. A founding member of the Conservation Commons, he is the president of Plazi, a Swiss based international association aimed at creating semantically enhanced linked taxonomic literature, related repositories, XML schemas, and resolving the copyright barrier. His presentation features bold slides that challenged the audience to truly think about the future of biodiversity digitization and the many issues that confront the success of such plans.

Life and Literature Speaker Presentations: Elycia Wallis

Today we move into the Research, Informatics, and the Published Record panel, and feature the presentation by one of our colleagues in the BHL-Australia camp, Dr. Elycia Wallis. You can also see an interview with her on the Conference Interviews page.

Panel 1: Research, Informatics, and the Published Record
Panelist: Elycia Wallis
Presentation Title: "Digitising for What?"

Through her presentation, Dr. Wallis challenged the audience to ask themselves why we are doing the digitization we are doing and whether, through this digitization, we are succeeding in our aim. She argues that much of the information about species on this planet, or particularly those already extinct, is only contained within the pages of legacy literature, and if we want to learn about them, we must make this literature accessible. She also makes some very salient points regarding target audiences. Be sure to check out her presentation, and see the final slides with notes for deeper commentary.

Life and Literature Speaker Presentations: Alain Touwaide

Today, we feature the third of our four awesome panelist from the Humanities panel at the Life and Literature conference. Enjoy Dr. Alain Touwaide's presentation on the Smithsonian Institution's digital collection on Renaissance Herbals!

Panel: Building Collaborative Networks for Science and the Humanities through Scientific Literature
Panelist: Alain Touwaide
Presentation Title: "Valeriana and the Banana Tree: Massive Digitization and the Dynamics of Publication"

Dr. Touwaide is the scientific director for the Preservation of Medical Traditions and a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Institution. The Renaissance Herbals digital collection featured in his presentation provides digitized texts of Renaissance-era herbal books, with added value such as analysis of scientific, common, and ancient names. The next steps for the project involve linking the references in the text to digitized versions and information about type specimens. It's certainly a project after BHL's own heart!

Life and Literature Speaker Presentations: Chris Wildrick

Check out another of the Humanities' panelist presentations, this one by artist Chris Wildrick!

Panel: Building Collaborative Networks for Science and the Humanities through Scientific Literature
Panelist: Chris Wildrick
Presentation Title: "Interactive Projects and Exploratory Systems: Imagination and Identification at the Limits of Knowledge"

Chris Wildrick is a conceptual artist and assistant professor at the School of Art & Design at Syracuse University. His work involves interactive games, charts, books, and digital media about Dinosaur Aesthetics. His presentation is full of his fun, imaginative work, which explores the creation and use of dinosaur imagery in our culture.