Night at the museum -- Smithsonian Castle

Smithsonian Castle Commons dinner party

With spectacled bear

Snowstorm Saturn starting up

Prodigal luggage returns from it's peripatetic voyage

Lovely open house at the new CLIR offices

Great to see some long ago colleagues and some interesting new people.

How can the #dpla fulfill Franklin's vision of libraries raising the US's "common tradesmen & farmers" to the intelligentsia of the world

"These libraries have improved the general conversation of the Americans, made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries, and perhaps have contributed in some degree to the stand so generally made throughout the colonies in defense of their privileges.”
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography

And here's my more verbose discourse ...

American Airlines 4400: RDU to DCA

US 3558 cancelled, rebooked on AA4400, gate Charlie 17

2nd Edition Used Books, RDU airport

Interesting idea!

Quasquicentennial of the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego

One of the iconic hotels in the United States, the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego, turns 125 this month. The hotel, on the National Register of Historic Places, is a fabulous place to visit (even if you don't stay there).

OMG! Harry Styles @ Durham Marriott!!!

Guess that means Taytay Swifty won't be here

Getting towards dusk in Durham

@BioDivLib & @EOL folk (@UDCMRK, @WUlate & @cydparr) at Phenotype Ontology RCN

Attending the Third Phenotype Ontology Research Coordination Network Annual Summit meeting, Durham, NC, 25-27 February 2013 along with William Ulate (BHL/Missouri Botanical Garden) and Cyndy Parr (Encyclopedia of Life). Plus around 57 other biologists, informaticians, and ontologists.

On the first day of the meeting was a "Hands-on Natural language annotation mixer show & tell." This was a "speed-dating" session where about twelve projects or people anchored tables and the rest of the participant were broken into groups of 4-5 and spread out to all the tables. Each table anchor had about 7-10 minutes with the group to discuss their project/problem and get feedback/insight from the mixers. BHL had table 8 (anchored by me). It was great to hear that well over half of the participants were very familiar with BHL and discussed current or future uses in their work.

From the description of the meeting: "The overall goal of the RCN Annual Summit meeting is to introduce and establish communication and collaboration among scientists from different research backgrounds. The two primary themes for this meeting are the use of text mining phenotypes and representing behavior in ontologies. The use of text mining is of important wherever there is a lot of information locked up in written material, including an enormous amount of phenotypic information. We have around ten text-mining experts with a broad range of expertise attending this meeting, and you would have many opportunities to interact with them and possibly build proposals. A small behavior group is funded by the RCN to meet the day preceding the annual meeting, and they will be presenting their report at the annual meeting and be available for small group discussion."

Among those attending were friends of BHL, Dr. Hong Cui. Dr. Cui has worked with BHL data on a number of projects, papers, and presentations. Gaurav Vaidya has worked with BHL on projects related to Wikipedia and taxonomic referencing. Katja Seltmann (lead author on the imporant new article "Utilizing Descriptive Statements from the Biodiversity Heritage Library to Expand the Hymenoptera Anatomy Ontology," Katja C. Seltmann, Zsolt Pénzes, Matthew J. Yoder, Matthew A. Bertone, Andrew R. Deans. PLOS One. 18 February 2013), and staffer in the Department of Invertebrate Zoology, American Museum of Natural History, gave insights into use of BHL at AMNH.

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Hong Cui

Gaurav Vaidya

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The meeting is being held in Durham at the NESCent  NESCent is The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) is a nonprofit science center dedicated to cross-disciplinary research in evolution. NESCent's mission is to "NESCent promotes the synthesis of information, concepts and knowledge to address significant, emerging, or novel questions in evolutionary science and its applications. NESCent achieves this by supporting research and education across disciplinary, institutional, geographic, and demographic boundaries."

A visit to the Sarah P. Duke Gardens, Duke University

Spent a lovely day at the Sarah P. Duke Gardens at Duke University today. It was a great day to walk around the gardens and catch up with my niece, talking about old times!

The Duke Gardens themselves are:

"Often spoken of as "the crown jewel of Duke University," Duke Gardens occupies 55 acres in the heart of west campus, adjacent to Duke University Medical Center.
It is recognized as one of the premier public gardens in the United States, renowned both for landscape design and the quality of horticulture, each year attracting more than 300,000 visitors from all over the world."

There wasn't a whole of in bloom, the the trees and water features were very nice. The ducks and geese didn't seem to mind the lack of flowers!