In addition to the work we do supporting the research and curatorial activities of the Smithsonian, Libraries and Archives’ staff are often involved in collaborative projects with other institutions, or are working on internal projects which are not hosted on our website. Here are some of the interesting things we’ve been working on lately.
Digital Public Library of America
The Smithsonian Libraries shares our digitized content with dp.la in two ways. The first is through our membership in the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which provides books, journal articles, and archival material related to biodiversity research. The second channel is through the Smithsonian’s Collections Search. Our digitized books, along with selected images and Smithsonian authored articles stored in Smithsonian Research Online are all indexed in both Collections Search and DPLA.
Biodiversity Heritage Library
The Smithsonian Libraries is one of the founding members of this virtual library, and is currently home to the administrative hub of the library known as the Secretariat. Since 2006 we have been digitizing material from our natural history collections to share through BHL. Learn more on our Biodiversity Heritage Library page.
AI and Big Data
… project applying AI to extract specimen names from all of the digitized Smithsonian Libraries collection that have been contributed to the Biodiversity Heritage Library in order for the National Museum of Natural History and other biodiversity institutions to automatically link these publications to specimens in their collections.