 Well, good afternoon, everybody. I'm delighted to see how many people have actually stayed this last half day of the conference, so welcome. I was just delighted to receive Fiona Bradley's invitation to speak at this conference, because I had never been to Manchester before. And so I came on Saturday, and I've had a chance to spend some time. It's really a great city, and it even stopped raining. But in keeping with the conference theme, this is a talk about discovering digital collections and marketing them. In my view, success depends on several factors. The collection must respond to a perceived need. That is, does a community already exist that wants this collection? The developers must collaborate with the community to create something that's easy to use. And after the collection is available, the managers of it must keep in touch with the community to make improvements and correct errors. Now, do you remember that this Kevin Costner movie called Field of Dreams? Does anybody remember it? Oh, good, because actually, I turned the TV on on Saturday. I couldn't believe it. And what should come up? But Field of Dreams, the movie. Well, you know it appeared in 1989, and it was nominated for an Academy Award about an Iowa corn farmer, who, hearing voices, interprets them as a command to build a baseball diamond in the middle of his corn fields, which he does. And out of the midst, the 1919 Chicago White Sox come to replay a game about which there was a scandal. The voice told the farmer, if you build it, that is the baseball diamond, they will come. Now, I have a somewhat adapted version of that phrase. If they want it, and you build it, they'll come. But what did they want? The they in our narrative were those who identify and classify species, and mostly work in natural history museums, but also those who want to know what organisms are living on and in their lands for good or evil. And what do we know? What we do know is that they want to do it faster, that is they want to identify these things faster. And why is that? Well, because of the millions of species alive in this world, every day 25 to 150 species are going extinct, at least according to one estimate. Now, Charles Darwin knew that you couldn't do this kind of work without a library. And he and his peers wrote about that in an 1847 report to the British Museum, when he said the cultivation of natural history cannot be efficiently carried out without reference to an extensive library. And indeed, natural history literature and archives contain information that is critical to studying life on Earth. This material includes, of course, species descriptions, distribution records that can help researchers and conservationists examine past population distribution and abundance and determine how it's changed over time. Historic climate records that are important for modern day climate change research, records of our history of scientific discovery, including expeditions that document modern sciences first encounters with various regions, cultures, and ecosystems. Literature and archives may be the only record for extinct species. These materials also document important scientific observations. And they contain valuable and beautiful scientific illustrations. And they also document ecosystems, allowing researchers to identify the various components of those ecosystems and assess how those ecosystems have changed over time. Unfortunately, historically, much of this literature has only been available in a few select libraries in the development world. Lack of access to this literature is a major impediment to the efficiency of scientific research. And this is known as the taxonomic impediment. Dr. John Sullivan, an evolutionary biologist associated with the Academy of Natural Sciences and Cornell University in the States, used these words when he said, science is all about disseminating knowledge and building upon what has come before. Yet so much of our knowledge of plants and animals has remained inaccessible to those who could make use of it. This has been a big part of the taxonomic impediment. Fortunately, the Biodiversity Heritage Library is changing this by providing free and open access to library collections from around the world. Our consultations helped us to define the mandatory requirements for this work. The database, first of all, must cover 15th to 20th, actually 21st century literature as far as possible. And we're getting more and more copyright permissions, especially for cereals, such that a quarter of the database now does consist of in-copyright items. It must be easy to use. We're still working on this, and we'll keep it in mind when updating the platform to BHL2. It must be open and freely available, that goes without saying. And it must be cost-effective and sustainable, that also goes without saying. The Internet Archive in California has helped with this, giving us good pricing as they do the digitizing work for those who contribute in the States. And charging dues to the members who are committed to this work is also helping with sustainability, but we're not quite there yet. And it must be collaborative. We've known this from the beginning, of course. In 2004, the Smithsonian Libraries hosted a meeting of librarians from the relevant communities to see if it'd be possible to meet this need. By the way, when I first wrote this sentence, I substituted the word medium for meeting, and I guess we could characterize it as sort of a seance. The Internet Archive, an open access vendor for creating digital products and located in San Francisco, provided a low-cost vehicle for digitizing and hosting the files, which are then moved to the BHL portal. The Encyclopedia of Life, which is another project to create a webpage for every species with photos and other data, including links to the literature, adopted BHL as its literature component. Then the MacArthur Foundation provided funding to the Encyclopedia of Life, and some of that went to create the BHL, and off we went. We have a vision of inspiring discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge. We've been accomplishing this vision for over 10 years now. BHL was born in 2006, and since then we have continuously provided free and open access to collections from the 15th to 21st centuries. Now, while a majority of our collections are in the public domain, we also work, as I said, with rights holders to secure permission to digitize incopyright content and make it freely and openly available in BHL under Creative Commons licenses. There are now 715 incopyright items, mostly serials, for which we have permissions. Now, here's a screenshot of the BHL portal's welcoming page, which you can find, as you can see, at biodiversitylibrary, one word, dot org. It's a collaboration of many content providers. BHL operates as a consortium of natural history and botanical institutions and libraries around the world that work together to digitize their own natural history collections and make them available. And some also provide technical help and promotional services. BHL participation is divided into members, affiliates, and partners, each of which have varying degrees of administrative and governance privileges. As of August 2017, we have 20 members and 18 affiliates with more on the way. There's a total of over 60 partners across every continent except Antarctica, and who knows, we may go there next, all contributing to the BHL. You probably can't read this list very well, but the pink arrow points to our two British partners, the Natural History Museum in London, and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. The BHL is governed by a members council composed of representatives from all the dues-paying members who elect a chair, vice chair, and a secretary, and these three form the executive committee. Currently, the chair is from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, the vice chair is your own Jane Smith from the Natural History Museum in London, and the secretaries from the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. And here is our current list of affiliates who also pay nominal dues. Where you see BHL Africa, BHL China, BHL Egypt, those can be also composed of partners that operate through a head organization in those continents. To date, BHL's collections include over 53 million pages, which comprise over 130,000 titles and nearly 217,000 volumes. Another major service that BHL provides is called taxonomic name recognition. Since our primary audience is scientists and taxonomists who are especially interested in locating material related to specific species or taxa, that's a useful service. So using global names recognition and discovery tools and services that are powered by global names architecture, these are other organizations. BHL indexes the scientific names on the pages in the books in our collections and then allows users to search on those names to find content of interest. And by searching on a taxonomic name, the user can retrieve a bibliography listing of all mentions of that name throughout BHL's collections and it can of course consist of thousands of mentions. As I mentioned earlier, we also work with rights holders to secure permission to digitize in copyright content. And I mentioned also that we have 715 titles now, which amounts to agreements with over 300 licensors. And we believe that inspiring discovery isn't just about providing access to literatures and the archives. It's also about providing tools and services that make it easy for users to locate material of interest and keep that content in a format that meets their needs. These are some examples, such as the taxonomic name searching services and a variety of apps and data exports. We also support a variety of reference management tools, including an integration with Mendeley and bibliographic downloads in something called bibtex and RIS formats. And please don't ask me what those are because I don't know. Users can also freely download our content either by full PDF or by selecting specific pages to create custom PDFs. And we've generated over 645,000 custom PDFs to date. We've also indexed over 241,000 articles, separate articles from the literature to allow users to search by article, not just monograph or journal title. And we also work with Crossref to assign DOIs, digital object identifiers to content in our collection, allowing users to easily cite their material. And to date we've assigned over 122,000 DOIs to monographs and a few select articles. So here's what a book looks like in BHL. I wouldn't have picked that page myself, but I didn't do this slide. This would have not been my favorite animal. There are various ways to zoom in on and view a page. And in the header you can also see easy ways to share the page you're looking at on social media and discover online mentions of the book you're looking at thanks to our implementation of alt metrics. On the right you can see the various download options available and then on the lower left you'll see the taxonomic name recognition in action. The scientific name box lists the taxonomic names found on the page you're viewing. And by clicking on any of those names you can then also go to a bibliography that lists other books that mention that name. So there's many ways of using the data that's there. And here's an example of a species bibliography. You can see that the right hand column allows you to click and immediately view any of the pages in that bibliography. Well, since the launch of the BHL website over 6.7 million unique users have visited the library. On average we receive 111,000 unique visitors each month. In total, we've had over 13 million visits to our website with an average of 192,000 visits each month. Our users come from all corners of the globe. Since the beginning of BHL we've received visitors from 243 countries and territories. We're also very active on social media with a presence on a blog plus all of these platforms. Across our channels, our handle is BioDiv Library. So we encourage you to follow our accounts to learn more about our amazing collections. Stay up to date with news and developments. Learn more about our tools and services and discover how BHL supports science and research around the world. One of the BHL's most popular social media sites is our Flickr site. Our collections are filled with millions of stunning scientific illustrations and we put over 122,000 of those images in Flickr. Those images have been viewed over 281 million times. We ask our community to add tags to these images to say what the species are. So far over 37,700 images or about 31% of the images have been tagged by volunteers. These tags also help us share images with other databases. Three years ago, Wired Magazine listed this Flickr site as one of the 27 must follow feeds in the world of science. And speaking of awards, BHL has received several over the years recognizing our collaborative work, our commitment to open access and our leadership in the library world. And if this presentation wasn't enough to convince you of our commitment to open access, BHL is also a charter signatory of the Buczow Declaration for Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management which allows organizations to demonstrate their commitment to open science. Our BHL staff's active interactions with the user community through a software called Gemini as well as social media has led to numerous testimonials. This one is from a curator of butterflies at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden in the Netherlands. BHL helps me progress, she says. And guess what? It isn't just about science. Here's a glass artist at Troy University in Alabama talking about the images on our Flickr site. We thought we would find that those images were attractive to more than just the scientists and it's turned out that we were right. They're being used for all sorts of graphic design and art and just browsing on this Flickr site. So BHL is a group enterprise in every way and has been from the beginning a global enterprise and one that seeks to change the nature of research methodologies in biology. So it's also a group enterprise in the production of these slides for which I thank our staff. And I thank you for your attention. I'm happy to answer questions as long as they aren't too technical. Thank you.