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Featured Books
    All Featured Books
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    Earth Optimism 2020
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Visit BHL
  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
    • BHL at 20
  • User Stories
  • Campaigns
    • Fossil Stories
    • Garden Stories
    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
  • Tech Blog
  • Visit BHL
Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL
BHL News, Blog Reel, Tech Updates

COinS integrated to support Zotero, other reference management software

Portrait version of the Biodiversity Heritage Library logo.

We have pushed a change to the BHL Portal user interface to enhance usability of our books. The new page is available at:
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/4323

Our goal with the improvement was to make the page more visually informative and, at the same time, easier to understand. We also took this opportunity to add in code that makes BHL more readily indexed by Zotero and other reference management applications. We’ve embedded COinS (ContextObject in Span) into the page above, as well as the pageturning view, at:
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/23172

COinS are snippets of bibliographic metadata embedded in a page using a span tag (hence the name). Reference management software, especially Zotero, use these snippets to automatically populate an entry, so that BHL users can be building reference lists within their citation managers as they’re using our site. Here’s what COinS look like:


&rft.genre=book &rft.btitle=At+last%3a+a+Christmas+in+the+West+Indies.+ &rft.place=London%2c &rft.pub=Macmillan+and+co.%2c &rft.aufirst=Charles &rft.aulast=Kingsley &rft.au=Kingsley%2c+Charles%2c
&rft.pages=1-352 &rft.tpages=352″>

Unfortunately there is a known issue in Zotero using COinS to describe journals themselves, so users get an error when trying to add a page like the following to Zotero:
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/8188

The workaround invalidates the COinS standard, based on OpenURL, so we decided to err on the side of good metadata and standards compliance and publish the COinS correctly. There are other ways of making Zotero work for journals, which we will implement in the next UI release.

Please comment below with suggestions for improvement or issues concerning these updates.

December 7, 2008by [email protected]

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About BHL

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”

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