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

All posts by Chris Freeland

BHL News, Blog Reel

Congratulations to BHL-Europe

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BHL-Europe is hosting a series of meetings in Berlin this week to celebrate the successful completion of their EU-funded project.  On Monday there was an international scientific symposium, “Communicating Biological Diversity,” with a goal of reviewing the progress implementing the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) 20 years after its adoption.  Notes and presentations given will be made available on the symposium web site: http://www.bhle-finals.blogspot.de/

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June 5, 2012byChris Freeland
BHL News, Blog Reel

BHL funded by NEH to reveal the Art of Life

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The Art of Life: Data Mining and Crowdsourcing the Identification and Description of Natural History Illustrations from the Biodiversity Heritage Library

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March 22, 2012byChris Freeland
BHL News, Blog Reel

Linking to Biodiversity Heritage Library from Wikipedia

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In 2008, following a discussion with a senior staff member within the Wikimedia Foundation, I began a test to “seed” or “plant” links from Wikipedia pages into our newly launched (at that time) Biodiversity Heritage Library web site.

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March 7, 2012byChris Freeland
BHL News, Blog Reel

Mendeley and BHL

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BHL has integrated a new feature that enables easy addition of BHL books into your Mendeley library. Mendeley is a modern platform and social network for sharing and storing research, and is fast becoming one of the most feature-rich reference management applications in common use by scientists. Mendeley has a wealth of great features to aid scientists in managing reference materials and find others with similar interests, and best of all, it’s free.

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January 30, 2012byChris Freeland
BHL News, Blog Reel, Tech Updates

New features for “discovered bibliography”

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BHL has used name finding algorithms that analyze all of the scanned pages in BHL and extract out the scientific names within. This functionality was released in 2007 and has received minor enhancements in usability. To date more than 81 million potential name strings have been identified by the TaxonFinder algorithm, representing 1.6 million unique names.

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November 1, 2010byChris Freeland
BHL News, Blog Reel, Tech Updates

Sample pages & books for OCR analysis

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As has been previously discussed, BHL has uncorrected text generated by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software for each of its scanned volumes, and that uncorrected text has implications for data mining and accurate search. OCR results are notoriously poor because the technology hasn’t improved much since it was “solved” for forms processing in the mid-1980’s, which doesn’t really help BHL at all with our challenge of getting accurate text for our heterogeneous digital library spanning more than 500 years of printed publications.

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October 17, 2010byChris Freeland
BHL News, Blog Reel, Tech Updates

Updates to API & Tech Documents

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New updates have been released for the BHL API, plus new documentation about data exports and other services are now available on the Developer Tools and API section of the BHL wiki.

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April 15, 2010byChris Freeland
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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. Headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, D.C., 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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