Transcript - Marketing and promotion of rare books and special collections: Nicole Kearney

Date: 12 July 2019

Speaker: Nicole Kearney

Event description: This talk is one of three that were presented under the umbrella ‘Marketing and promotion of rare books and special collections’ for Melbourne Rare Book Week 2019. This talk features Nicole Kearney discussing the Biodiversity Heritage Library digitization project, and its possibilities for contributing organisations. Other related talks include Gemma Steele and Daniel Wee.

Transcript

Nicole: Good morning everyone. It’s almost afternoon, hopefully you can stay a little bit later. I’m really excited to be here today to talk to you as part of Rare Book Week. I’m really lucky to work with rare book collections around Australia and around the world and I’m really excited to talk to you about that work today.

Firstly I’d like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land in which we sit, the Boonwurrung and Woi Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation, but I would also like to acknowledge the first peoples of all of Australia because that acknowledgement is missing from the material that I work with. So these are all illustrations that are taken from books that were published in Europe by white men. They are all the first descriptions, or the first scientific descriptions, of these species and you can see from the dates that they are from a time when these animals were being “discovered” by Europeans. And the text descriptions that accompany these illustrations are often very short, they’re often filled with inaccuracies and they contain no acknowledgement of the fact there was already a people on this land who were intimately familiar and had so much knowledge about the animals here in Australia. And also their illustrations were far more accurate than these.

I’m Nicole Kearney and I’m the manager of the Australian branch of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which is a global project that aims to digitise the biodiversity heritage literature of the world and make it accessible to everyone. It’s now the largest virtual library of biodiversity literature. It exists because “The cultivation of natural science cannot be efficiently carried out without reference to an extensive library.” And this is a quote by Charles Darwin, which means that it must be true. [Laughter.]

Our collection goes all the way back to 1484. This is the oldest book we have in our collection; it describes 150 plants and 96 medicines each accompanied by a beautiful woodcut as you can see here, and this book was contributed by the Missouri Botanic Gardens. And the Missouri Botanic Gardens is just one of the 466 libraries around the world who are digitising their collections and making them accessible online. Together these libraries have contributed over 56 million pages from 244 thousand books. All of which are openly accessible and they contain information on millions and millions and millions of the world’s species. And those millions of pages are accessed by millions of people. So since 2006, when this project began, we’ve had over 2… [corrects figure] almost 9 million total unique users and those users come from 243 countries and territories around the globe.

Australia began contributing to the project in 2010 with just a single organization– this one here, Museums Victoria. And the project is federally funded by the Atlas of Living Australia. Now, Museums Victoria is the largest museum organisation in the whole of the southern hemisphere with a rather impressive suite of venues. But this is our library. [Laughter.] And this is why the project exists. Because like most museum libraries and herbarium libraries around Australia, it is closed to the public and behind-the-scenes. Behind those doors are incredible treasures. Those treasure are these wonderful librarians. [Laughter.] But they also have wonderful books and those librarians do, as you heard, wonderful things to promote those books. But our entire project exists to promote these collections online all across the world.

Now very occasionally special people get to go behind-the-scenes and look at those books (Gemma talked about some of the behind-the-scenes tours they put on for people like volunteers who work here at Museums Victoria.) So, a few people get to go up close and personal with these books.

And a very tiny proportion of our collection is on display. Now this is I think one of the most beautiful books ever published. It’s the first volume of John Gould’s Birds of Australia. It’s upstairs in the Darwin to DND exhibition. Now we have conservators here who turn the pages once a year. So this is the page that was on display in 2016 to 2017, they turned the page and you could see this page from 2017 to 2018. This is the page that’s currently on display. And I’ve just heard that they’re going to turn the page again later this month. So if you want to see this page you can run up there and have a look. [Laughter.] I get really excited when they turn the page, I always tweet about it. “There’s a new page on display at Melbourne Museum!”, but if you can’t wait a year to see the next page then you can go online, because this is online on the Biodiversity Heritage Library website. And just a sneak peek, that’s the next page, you can already see it, but next month it’ll be available in the Darwin to DND exhibition.

Now this book was digitised by the Smithsonian Libraries, which is kind of disappointing for me. As I said the global project began operations in 2006 and we in Australia didn’t start digitising until 2010. So there was a four year period in which other people digitised a lot of the really key publications about Australia’s biodiversity and this was one of them. A lot of them were digitised by natural history museums in places like London and Paris and the Smithsonian’s collection is up there as well. So our librarians had to find things that were not online already or that were particularly special and they did a wonderful job of doing that and we have some amazing things that we’ve contributed. Now you might have seen pictures of… that Gemma put out, this is Albert Seba’s Thesauri, which is a fantastic item in our collection. Now there were already two copies of this online on the Biodiversity Heritage Library website. But they were not as beautiful as ours. There was this copy contributed by the Missouri Botanic Gardens, which was just black and white and the Smithsonian also had a copy which I don’t think is anywhere near as vibrantly beautiful as the one we put online. And the fact there are differences in these beautiful rare books there are only a very few number of copies existing in the world, the fact that they’re different and they’ve been coloured differently in different places are of great interest to historians and to scientists around the world. So I’m very proud that we’ve put this one online, so that Museums Victoria’s copy is up there.

This is another one of my favourites, this is one of the volumes from George Shaw’s Naturalists Miscellany, which is about 24 volumes of a book, or a publication, that was published at the end of the 1700s and early 1800s. Descriptions of animals that were being sent back to Europe from places all around the world, and because of the timing of that publication in the 1700s, early 1800s, it contains a lot of the very first descriptions of Australia’s animals including this one. This is the first description of the duck-billed platypus, its international debut in the literature in 1799. And our animals were weird, I mean you saw some weird things up on the screen before but they weren’t as weird as this. This is an animal that was described to the world by Shaw like this. He said of “Of all the Mammalia yet known it seems the most extraordinary… …perfect resemblance of the beak of a duck engrafted onto the head of a quadruped… it naturally excites the idea of some deceptive preparation by artificial means.” In fact, if you go to the Natural History Museum in London and look at the specimen from which this description came from you can see it’s actually been cut across the neck. And that’s because they were looking for the stiches. They thought the bill had been sewed onto the animal and so this was a very, very bizarre creature. I am very proud that we put that online, that’s another Museums Victoria book.

This is another one, this is a book on display as part of our ‘Art of Science’ exhibition, which was a Museums Victoria exhibition that travelled around Victoria and New South Wales. Before this book was put on display in the exhibition we digitised it and we put it online. So that anyone who went to the exhibition could be directed to flick through these pages online again. I find it very frustrating when you see books behind glass and I know I’m not supposed to touch them but I always want to turn those pages and we’ve made that possible. Not only did we put that book online, but we created an online exhibition of all of the books that featured in that exhibition and that exhibition is now closed but you can still go through all those books and turn those beautiful pages online.

So we have a digitisation lab upstairs, that’s Ely Wallis there pictured. She started the Biodiversity Heritage Library project in Australia and she still champions it today. Chris Healey sitting here in front, he’s our [digitisation] technician officer who looks after our scanner and does a lot of the scanning for our project. And we also have a fantastic team of twelve volunteers. They do some of that scanning as well and they also add the all-important metadata, all that bibliographic information, page level metadata that makes our content discoverable, which is really key to the project.

In 2014 when I started working on the project, we had four contributors so we’ve grown somewhat. They were all museums, they were all located in the south-east of Australia and being the sort of museums they were, they focused on zoology and on palaeontology. So we had no botany in our collection. So when I started, a big part of my role was to expand this to broaden our breadth geographically, but also taxonomically. So I wrote to organisations around Australia; the herbaria, the museums, the field naturalist societies, the royal societies, trying to encourage them to contribute to the Biodiversity Heritage of Australia that we were putting online. And we had quite a lot of success. This is my desk, it looks like this quite often and I get things posted to me from all of these organisations across Australia. They’re mostly journals, not the rare material or fragile material. But we’re very excited about being able to put those journals online and some of those journals are quite old. This is the very first volume of the Australian Museum Memoir published in 1851, and we’re digitising and putting online the journal runs all the way up to the current day. So here’s one from 2017, the Tasmanian Naturalist.

In order to get rare books online we need to travel and take our digitisation equipment elsewhere, we can’t do this on a national scale level unfortunately, but we’ve been able to do it a little bit in Victoria. In 2015, 2016, we’ve moved our entire digitisation operation and staff and volunteers and equipment across to the State Botanical Collection in the National Herbarium. We digitised a lot of their beautiful journals and also a large portion of their rare book collection, which are all now online, and that’s very, very exciting.

We’re now collaborating with the state libraries around Australia because they far better resourced than the small natural history organisations and have their own digitisation operations. And we’re very excited for the State Library of New South Wales has sent us digitised copies of their rare books, which will be online in the coming months. There are some of their wonderful librarians, many… some of you will know who they are. So we’ve grown, 2019 we now have 25 contributing organisations across the country representing every state and territory and the herbariums are certainly on board. So we’ve certainly increased our breadth taxonomically as well. Still based at Museums Victoria with most of that digitisation happening in this building.

This month we were very excited we just hit over 300 thousand pages digitised, so that’s all material that used to be in library archives, now online accessible to everyone. And last year, Cerise Howard, who’s our Digitisation Coordinator, and I went across to New Zealand to start the BHL New Zealand project. They’re very lucky to have a library that is open to the public with beautiful rare books on display. They also have a publication that goes back to the 1800s that they produce in house, a journal, and a fantastic rare book collection. And they have just started to upload their beautiful items online, so you can flick through those pages as well.

Now a huge part of my job is making that content discoverable, so we put a lot of stuff online and how do we make sure we can find it. And I do that in all sorts of ways and I work with programmers and I work with a lot of the other museums to do that and I’m just going to talk about a couple of ways that we’ve done that here by Museums Victoria. I’m absolutely fascinated by those first descriptions. This is the very first description of Victoria’s faunal emblem, which is the Leadbeater’s Possum. That description was produced by our very first director Frederick McCoy. Now if you turn the page, which you can do online, there’s the beautiful illustration, the first published illustration of that species. And in 1885, Frederick McCoy produced what I think is the most beautiful publication ever to come out of Museums Victoria, which is the Prodromus of the Zoology of Victoria, which has been digitised and put online as well. And that’s a coloured version of that original description. Now in our collection here at Museums Victoria we have the specimen from which that description was made in our collection and you can see the record for that online on our Museums Victoria Collections website and we also have the original artwork that was used to produce those beautiful illustrations by John James Wild. We also have some of his beautiful detailed illustrations in our collection and some of his original handwritten notes. So we’ve connected those all online on our local Museums Victoria collections website and Ursula Smith who works here at Museums Victoria added links to all of those collection records linking directly out to the literature that I showed you before. So you can go straight from our collection to the literature and we encourage lots of other websites to do the same and we’re hoping to link back. So you can link directly through to the Biodiversity Heritage Library website from there.

Now that beautiful publication, the Prodromus of the Zoology of Victoria is full of fantastic illustrations, some of them are actually on sale in the shop. We have uploaded albums of those onto Flickr, and we have a project whereby citizen scientists, our online volunteers, add data to those images. And so they add the original scientific names that we used at the time of the publication, they add the currently accepted scientific name because often they change over time, they also add the location where the animals are from, and they add the artist’s name. So adding all of this data and we add it as a machine readable tag as well as a free tag. And that means that other websites and databases can find this information and pull that content in. So if you go to the taxonomic databases, like the Encyclopaedia of Life or the Atlas of Living Australia, you’ll find these images on there because we’ve tagged them. So thank you so much to all our online volunteers who do that amazing work for us.

Now this talk is meant to be all about promoting Australia and I suppose New Zealand’s biodiversity literature. Obviously putting all that content online makes it discoverable and accessible to everyone. But we also post regularly and share our news on the Biodiversity Heritage Library blog. This was an old one in 2011 when we celebrated our first year of operation here in Australia. Next year we’re going to have a much bigger cake ‘cause it’s our ten year anniversary [Laughter.] We’ve obviously posted when we do exciting things like have a summer sabbatical across in the gardens. Sorry I should say that, that’s another one of our fantastic volunteers Bob Griffith. That’s Ely Wallis there, again we were very excited in 2017 to get a new scanner. So we’re doing even more beautiful images from our books. Of course we post when we do exciting things like go across and start a new country’s version of our project. And we also have a Twitter site, now I’m a little embarrassed now to say that we have over two thousand followers. It sounds that we don’t have the thousands and hundreds of thousands that some other people do. I only work three days a week, and this is a very small part of my role that I do try and share all of the wonderful collections that we put online and also the content that other organisations put online.

We get some really lovely feedback from our followers. When I posted this, this is the very first description of the wombat. I mentioned earlier that some of our descriptions are very, very short, the first description of the wombat says badger sized and yellow and that is it [Laughter.] Sorry here I’ve actually shortened it “…colour pale yellow: fur longish and sub- erect: nose strongly divided by a furrow”. That’s it, that’s the description, the first description, the official scientific description of the wombat. When we posted this online someone said that my twitter site, ah sorry our twitter site is a treasure trove of goodness. Which I thought was lovely and earlier this month when I posted that we had just hit 300 thousand pages, someone said that our project was “...a gift to the world”. So that makes me very proud of everybody who is involved in this project.

So thank you very much for listening. I do have some brochures and some cards for our project if you’re… that Gemma’s got by the door there if you’re interested. If you have any questions please email me or talk to me after as we have probably run out of time. But it’s been very lovely to be part of Rare Book Week and thank you very much for listening. [Clapping.]