For the Birds: Adapting Archives and Extracting Data for the Biodiversity Heritage Library

What this was about

Amanda Boczar and Sydney Jordan described the University of South Florida Libraries' environmental archives and its new BHL partnership. Anecdotes illustrated the stakes: digitised ornithological records helped establish the American flamingo as native to Florida, while nearly 100 years of Egmont Key records were likely destroyed by Hurricane Milton. After being turned away while BHL was closed to new members, USF joined the consortium in December and has spun up a redundant instance of the Macaw ingest platform on its AWS cloud, with public launch planned for mid-October. Sydney described the FLENH collections (38 archival collections, SORA's 87,000 articles, 112,000 records and 6.7 million downloads), rights and accessibility (WCAG 2.1) obligations, and early tests showing AI extraction of handwritten tabular field data introduces significant errors requiring human correction.

Why it matters. Shows how a partner institution can underpin a transitioning infrastructure, and highlights both the value and the difficulty of extracting data from handwritten archival field records.

In the room

• USF holdings are mainly historical ornithological and marine science records collected on paper.
• Florida's climate, storms and unstable funding threaten archives stored in attics, storage units and marina lockers.
• Macaw redundancy adds a third ingest route alongside Smithsonian and BHL Australia; first onboarding planned for November.
• USF adopted the Searchable Ornithological Research Archive (SORA) when its host could no longer sustain it.
• 108 items (~2,800 pages) uploaded during early testing.
• Field notes and warden reports mix qualitative and quantitative data in non-standard formats and often prose.
• Aggregated published datasets often omit variables like temperature and tides found in raw field notes.

Notable moments