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Wednesday, May 25 10:15 to 10:40 AM |
Susie Cobbledick, Missouri Botanical Garden “Pesticides in Library Collections” The use of pesticides in natural history collections is well known, but did you know that these chemicals have also been applied to books? Find out how the staff at the Missouri Botanical Garden Library discovered that books in their collections had been treated with pesticides and learn how to identify the visual evidence of mercury and arsenic, two of the elements more frequently present in insecticidal applications. The presenter will wrap up by asking for your help in determining how wide-spread this practice may have been (or if it is still being practiced!) |
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Wednesday, May 25 10:40 to 11:05 AM |
Sarah Burke Cahalan, Director of Marian Library "Mary's Gardens: Twentieth Century Garden History at the University of Dayton" Garden history can be found in surprising places. The University of Dayton's Marian Library is the world's largest and most comprehensive collection of materials on the Virgin Mary, from medieval Books of Hours to recent publications from the Vatican. There are also important archival holdings, including a recently-processed collection documenting a twentieth-century movement to promote the creation of "Mary Gardens." The collection includes garden plans, seed lists, correspondence, and photographs; the holdings demonstrate the movement's connection to Catholic social justice work, as well as to the ethics of sustainable food practices. This presentation will also discuss future plans for the collection, which include a major exhibit in 2017. |
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Wednesday, May 25 11:05 to 11:30 AM |
Brad Lyon and Joanne Fuccello of Woodburn Books, Kathy Crosby of Brooklyn Botanical Garden, and Susan Eubank of Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden “A Reconsideration of Stewardship and the De-Accession Dilemma” A panel discussion about the changing nature of the book and its beholder--whether bookseller, collector, librarian, or library patron; the lament of acts of de-accession—their criteria and process; and looking for a book, in say, 2216? |
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Thursday, May 26 8:00 to 8:25 AM |
Allaina Wallace, Denver Botanical Garden “Water, Water Everywhere: Five Water Leaks in Two Years” Practice makes perfect? The Helen Fowler Library has endured 5 water leaks in less than two years. This presentation will examine these events, their causes, our responses and recovery efforts, and changes we’ve made in an attempt to counteract the threat. |
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Thursday, May 26 8:30 to 10:30 AM |
Patrick Randall, Community Manager, Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature, Ernst Mayr Library, Museum of Comparative Zoology; Harvard University; “Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature” Many libraries and museums face difficulties when sharing their content. Various challenges in terms of insufficient amounts of content, indexing taxonomic names, and creating informative metadata often pose barriers to the availability and accessibility of collections to the public. To help increase the amount of discoverable biodiversity and cultural heritage materials, it is advantageous to develop new partnerships as well as make supporting tools and services available towards a shared and sustainable national digital platform. To this end, the members and partners of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) collaborate jointly in proposals that improve discoverability through free access to biodiversity knowledge. Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL) is a new IMLS-funded project that attempts to address the above-mentioned challenges. Their aim is to create an innovative model for improving access to data and supporting collaboration among participating institutions. Specifically, EABL will leverage BHL as a springboard in enabling biodiversity content providers to contribute to the national digital platform which will be hosted by the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). BHL will provide a repository that will allow even disadvantaged natural history institutions to share digital content, thus significantly increasing online accessibility to their materials. Complementing this effort is the Mining Biodiversity project which aims to improve the discoverability of information in BHL. One of the awardees of the Trans-Atlantic Digging into Data 3 competition, the consortium behind this project combines expertise in the fields of data analytics, text mining, visualization and social media science to enhance BHL’s search portal. In this way, users are provided with tools that will enable them to find information of interest more efficiently, as well as discover hidden connections between biodiversity topics. With this talk, we seek to engage with different libraries and museums to (1) explain how they, as potential content providers, could benefit from exposing their materials in BHL through the EABL project, and (2) demonstrate how their users’ information needs could be better supported by the enhancements introduced by the Mining Biodiversity effort. |