The Biodiversity Heritage Library is coming into a new era complete with a new look, new content, and new features. The first, most obvious, change will be the adoption of a new BLUE color scheme. Users will not be faced with the need to adapt to a new UI environment; we’re simply changing color as a way of marking BHL’s evolution. BHL is evolving in three distinct ways with regard to its content and features:

• The BHL collection has added over 21,000 new titles (that’s over 28,000 new volumes) as a result of ingesting open access texts scanned by Internet Archive, bringing the total collection (to date – 17 Nov 2009) to 69,000 volumes! Users will now have access to biodiversity related content from the major university and research institutions that have partnered with the Internet Archive such as the California Digital Library. By aggregating biodiversity literature into its collection from other sources, BHL is increasing its ability to serve as a definitive resource for access to the world’s biodiversity literature.
• New links to documentation and user tutorials are being added. These links are part of a new website (actually a wiki) dedicated to providing users with more information about the BHL project overall, its history, member institutions, and developments for the future. Still in its early stages of development, the new wiki will serve as a one-stop-shop for communication about the BHL collection, as well as its tools and services.
• BHL taxonomic name data now have direct links to Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) pages via a new EOL icon, such as this page on the Orca, Orcinus orca, online at http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/7869924. When viewing the “Names on this page” panel in the BHL Portal, an EOL icon will appear next to the taxon or binomial linking to the corresponding page on the EOL website. Users will be merely a click away to EOL content!

The new content and features are just the beginning of BHL evolutionary adaptations to come. As a digital library organism within its WWW environment, it is sensitive to the changing needs of its users. Whether mutating from brown to blue or doubling its collection, or undergoing small incremental changes with the development of its new wiki for documentation and user tutorials, the BHL will work to serve its users through the exciting new eras to come. Let us know what you think.

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.

As this was our first attempt at crowdsourcing, we didn’t know what kind of data quality to expect. We have been monitoring the data submitted since releasing the functionality in January, and formed the criteria for a more formal analysis. After reviewing the metadata for a sample of 50 PDFs out of a total of 802 generated between January 15, 2009 and the end of March the following trends were revealed:

Overview

• 88% of articles were assigned article-level titles by users, indicating that they are comfortable entering metadata without a great deal of prompting. So far, the only guidance in the interface is “Are you generating a PDF containing the text of a single journal article or book chapter? If so, please help us out by providing the following information!”
• 22% of the PDFs generated could not be considered true articles. They were determined to be arbitrary selections of pages.
• 24% of the PDFs generated were not articles in the bibliographic sense but were species descriptive/relevant excerpts from larger works.
• 50% of the PDFs generated could be considered true articles in the bibliographic sense, complete with identifiable titles, authors, and subjects.

Metadata Accuracy Stats
Accuracy was measured on a scale of low to high for title, author, and subject

Titles

• 55% of article title metadata was found to be highly accurate
• 14% was considered medium = interpreted or modified
• 27% was considered low = extrapolated from a non-obvious source OR the article title was available but a poorly descriptive article title was attributed or no article-level title was provided at all

Authors

• 67% high accuracy, however formatting issues will need to be addressed to streamline differences in Firstname Lastname entries. Anything from Bianca Lipscomb to Lipscomb, B. to B. Lipscomb was found; users did not necessarily follow the formatting presented in the original text
• 29% at medium accuracy, meaning that author names were either significantly abbreviated or interpreted from the source text
• only 2% at low accuracy, meaning that no author was attributed to the article even though it should have been

Subjects
Subjects were more difficult to analyze as compared with titles and authors above. For the most part, I was satisfied with only 6 instances of subject attribution, i.e. appropriate subject and geographic keywords. Many users simply neglected subjects or used the original title for the subject. Either way, I think it important that subjects are required metadata in order to trace associations between articles in the repository. This is, of course, coming from a librarian’s perspective.

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