The problem: Digitizing, indexing, and annotating historical scientific literature is vital to future research in systematic botany, the science of the identification of plants. Like other natural history disciplines - but unlike the physical sciences - systematic botany is built upon and requires frequent reference to the literature of its past. To conduct carefully documented and authenticated research, botanists must spend weeks in library collections searching the published botanical literature for data to develop a new project or substantiate their recent observations. Comprehensive collections of botanical literature are only available in a handful of libraries, all located in North American and Europe. For botanical researchers, these library-centered literature searches, while a crucial requirement of any project, delay hypothesis development or recognition and publication of new plant discoveries. For those traveling in remote parts of North America or stationed overseas, lack of access to library resources compounds these difficulties. Further, no matter how scrupulous the search, when scientists must work manually through an array of journals and books it is impossible to be sure that all historical facts have been located and all published observations have been seen. Over 67,000 systematic botanical publications exist, but only those most recently published are in digitized form.

The solution: To improve access to scientific literature, we have created Botanicus, a freely accessible, Web-based encyclopedia of digitized historic botanical literature from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library. We have been digitizing materials from our library since 1995, focusing primarily on beautifully illustrated volumes from our rare book collection. Botanicus has been supported by generous funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the W.M. Keck Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The project undertakes four aims:

  1. Develop a model for digitized scientific literature: a universal data structure and metadata schema that will define how scientific disciplines, museums, or individual scientists use and configure available digitized literature on their subjects to initiate or support a research project;
  2. Program and test an extensible reference system based on the scientific literature model and universally applicable to all areas of natural history;
  3. Capture a robust, targeted subset of systematic botanical literature as images and associated defining metadata for those references, and employ automated OCR and XML markup protocols to convert the image to text and embed links to external data sets;
  4. Provide a Web Portal to the scientific literature system that will facilitate research and intensify the vital work on science-based conservation of the world's biological diversity through an interactive, intelligent interface to systematic botanical literature.

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