All posts from April 2009

We’ve been investigating options for storage and distribution of citation data in the Biodiversity Heritage Library. In particular, we are searching for an appropriate “core” format. The thought is that with an appropriately verbose, open, standard core format for our citations, we can transform that format into whatever other format we might want to support. By “verbose”, we mean a format that can support all of the information that we need to preserve. By “open”, we’re looking for a format that’s not tied exclusively to one system or vendor. And by “standard”, we’re hoping to identify a format that is widely recognized by the library community.

In previous posts we have discussed the issues surrounding the identification of articles contained within BHL scanned books and the new interface we’ve developed that let’s users build their own PDFs for download. In that interface(demo for The Journal of agricultural science, v.7) we ask users who are building a PDF of an article to contribute the article title, author(s), and subjects/tags and we’ll store that information alongside the generated PDF and make it available for other users to search and download.

I wanted to let everyone know about a change that has been made to the search function of the BHL portal.Until now, letters that include diacritics (for example, ó, ö, è, é, û) were treated differently than letters without diacritics.What this meant is that in order to find titles, authors, or subjects that included diacritics, you had to search for an exact match on the diacritic… for example, to find all titles about “invertebrate zoology”, you had to search twice: once for “invertebrate zoology” and once for “invertebrate zoölogy”. (Or you had to search for something like “invertebrate zo” and hope you didn’t get too much extra stuff in the search results.) Obviously, there are all sorts of problems with this limitation.

What appears to be a male Dodo bird (Raphus cucullatus) approximately 2 and a half feet tall has been discovered today, April 1, nesting among the bushes in the butterfly garden of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. How the creature, that hasn’t been seen since the 17th century, has come to reside Washington, DC remains a mystery. Smithsonian Security was alerted to the presence of the bird by an alert tourist who heard the loud syncopated calls of the once thought extinct bird. Nicknamed “Lazarus,” the Dodo exhibits a friendly curiosity about humans, clearly enjoying the excitement and attention its presence is generating.