Academy of Natural Sciences part of huge digital imaging project

It's not every day that an 18-year-old art student has the opportunity to work with some of the rarest and most beautiful images ever created.

Yet here at the Academy of Natural Sciences is Stephanie Zuppo, a Moore College of Art sophomore, affixed to a tall stool, at her feet an enormous volume bathed in brilliant light.

She focuses on a flower - a rose, possibly the first rendering of that particular variation of flora - and carefully adjusts her scanner.

An image originally created at around 1800 by Pierre Joseph Redouté, the great Belgian painter and botanist, is about to enter the universe of digital electronics, invisibly passing into machinery and onto gold compact discs, eventually into various databases and then out to the virtual world, available to anyone.

The Academy of Natural Sciences, perhaps best known locally as home of dinos and butterflies, has just joined an elite library consortium with an ambitious democratic purpose. The Biodiversity Heritage Library, as the four-year-old collective is called, seeks to scan, digitize and make available on the Internet all published information on biodiversity held in its members' collections.

The academy, which has a strong collection of 18th- and early 19th-century works, now is one of the dozen libraries in the United States and Europe involved in the work. Their holdings contain "most of the taxonomic literature known to man," said Danianne Mizzy, the academy's library director.

"They've already got 13 million pages, 12 million different species" on the Internet, she said - at http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org. That means only another 70 million or 80 million or 100 million pages to go.

And it doesn't stop there. The biodiversity library is only one element of an even larger digital project - the Encyclopedia of Life, an effort to digitize and make available all information on every species known to exist. Its organizers acknowledge that the project is audacious, but it is already building an online presence at www.eol.org.

With more than 200,000 items in its library, the academy is a natural participant, despite the fact that the vast majority of its holdings consists of manuscripts. (Unpublished manuscripts and other items, while historically interesting, are not relevant to the biodiversity library effort, which deals only with published material that serves to identify species.)

That, however, is overriden by the fact that in this instance, while old is good and early is better, first is always best - the first description of a plant or animal serves as a baseline for all future descriptions, undergirding the entire edifice of taxonomy, the science of classification.

"Taxonomic literature is the opposite of wanting to know only what's the most current and up to date by which everything is superseded," said Mizzy. "Nothing is ever superseded in taxonomy. The first description is always the typeset, so the half-life of 'how long is this relevant in taxonomic literature' is much longer than any other scientific literature."

Thus, what was good in 1709 is still good, which makes the academy's library of very rare illustrated texts of flora and fauna extremely useful. But many of these volumes, including Jardin de la Malmaison by E.P. Ventenat, published in 1802-03 with Redouté's vivid color plates, are difficult to digitize quickly and inexpensively: too big.

"The kind of scanning done here currently and starting back in 1998 is called boutique scanning, where you're doing one volume at a time, one page at a time by hand," Mizzy said. "The per-page costs are very high because of the method. The reason the Biodiversity Heritage Library was able to get to this critical mass [of 13 million pages] so quickly was they partnered up . . . and are using robotic scanning stations called scribes that are able to do . . . thousands of pages in a day."

That's not possible with many of the academy's old volumes.

"There are materials that are not susceptible to this kind of robotic scanning," she continued. "They're too small. Too big. Too fragile. Too tightly bound. Or they may have beautiful illustrations that are in the form of foldouts. You can never have a robot scanning this type of material."

So for the moment, Stephanie Zuppo is scanning images from the garden of Empress Josephine and the academy is joining other institutions with a federal grant to try to figure out how to do boutique scanning more efficiently and at lower cost.

For scientists and researchers - and anyone interested in the living world, really - the overall project offers enormous benefits.

"Essentially, it's democratizing access to the most important books of the last five centuries," said Robert McCracken Peck, the academy's senior fellow. "This early literature is still totally relevant today. It needs to be quotable and referenceable."

Ted Daeschler, a paleontologist and academy associate curator, emphasized the communications potential of such digital projects.

"So much of science is built on previous knowledge and access to resources," he said. "A resource is a book or a published scientific paper or an organism. For science to progress, the easier the access to various resources, the better."

A digital world will, at least in some cases, make it unnecessary to travel to a particular library or collection to see one unique resource; the resource, in this case published text and imagery, will be available on the Internet.

"When you're looking at a plant in the field and you want to know has this species been described before, you need to go all the way back to the beginning, to before [Empress] Josephine, to figure out if it's new or not," said Mizzy, gesturing at Zuppo's scan. "So the impact is that when a scan like this goes into the Biodiversity Heritage Library, that guy out in the field, if he has access to a satellite, can look at the taxonomic literature, can get into the taxonomic literature."

Eileen Mathias, the academy's information librarian, said the goal is even greater than that.

"Eventually the Biodiversity Heritage Library will connect to the Encyclopedia of Life," she said. "It will be an encyclopedia of all the world's species. Anyone can look on there. If you find an insect in the backyard and you want to know what it is, you can go to the Encyclopedia of Life to figure it out."