Supporting Access to Zoological Literature: Article Definition in the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Supporting Access to Zoological Literature: Article Definition in the Biodiversity Heritage Library

This post was written by
Katerina
Ozment,
part of the
Smithsonian
Libraries’
50
th
Anniversary
2019
Intern Class, funded by the Secretary of the Smithsonian and the Smithsonian National Board.
At that
time
she was
an undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma, majoring in History and Biology.
Katerina
is now a graduate student at
the University of Tennessee,
College of Communication and Information,
School of Information Sciences. The internship program is now the
Smithsonian Libraries and Archives’ 50th Anniversary program
.
For zookeepers to most effectively care for their animals, they need access to zoological research, as well as a way to communicate with other zookeepers. One way for zookeepers to do this is through participation in professional organizations such as the American Association of Zoo Keepers (AAZK) and its publication,
Animal Keepers’ Forum
(AKF). AKF contains current research, husbandry techniques, animal enrichment activities, conservation news, and other topics.
Due to AKF’s role in facilitating this kind of communication, Smithsonian Libraries (now Smithsonian Libraries and Archives) requested permission from AAZK to
digitize the Libraries’ copies of AKF
and make them available through the
Biodiversity Heritage Library
(BHL). BHL is an open access digital library for biodiversity works. Smithsonian Libraries and Archives is one of the only BHL member libraries that supports an active zoo and therefore has a unique commitment to providing for this user community in BHL.
Although the publication was already available online, searching for specific articles remained difficult. This is because AKF was uploaded as whole issues as opposed to individual articles. It was uploaded this way because the metadata (data about the work) associated with the Libraries’ record applies to each issue, not each article. Descriptive metadata includes information such as the title, volume, issue number, or date of a work. This metadata ensures that BHL is searchable and that specific works can be located.
However, researchers are used to having article-level metadata and often search for a specific article or article topics. Currently, if a researcher searched for a specific article author in the name field, it would not bring up the articles written by that author for AKF. Similarly, if an article’s title was searched for in the title field, it would not be found. Without article-level metadata, such as article titles or article authors, these resources are much harder to find. It is possible to do a full text search and find articles by title or author that way; however, the OCR (optical character recognition) the full text search relies on is not corrected. If there are mistakes in the OCR, the search terms won’t be found. This is especially true when an article has graphic design elements, or text overlaid on a picture, as both…