BHL has made some big changes today. Our site now features a new logo, a new “Donate” button and enhanced social media functionality that significantly improves the way you can interact with and share BHL content.

New Opportunities to Support and Share

We know you love BHL, and from the plethora of feedback that we’ve received from users over the years, we know there are many of you that want to help support us. In light of this feedback, we’ve added new “Donate” functionality to the BHL. By clicking on the “Donate” button at the top of your screen, you have the opportunity to provide tax-deductible financial gifts to BHL that will help support continuing development and scanning. A very warm and heartfelt thanks goes out to our users in advance for checking out this new functionality and considering a gift of support.

You can also show your support of the BHL for free by liking us on Facebook or tweeting about us on Twitter! For some time now, we have been building a presence on a variety of social media platforms, including Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter (for a list of all of our social media accounts, visit our public wiki). We’ve now added new linked icons to each of our social media platforms on the left-hand navigation bar of the BHL website.

We love the way social media has allowed us to connect and interact with users in ways we couldn’t before, including sharing thousands of beautiful images with you, conducting daily trivia contests, and hearing from you about what you like about BHL and what you’d like to see improved or added to our site or collection. As great as this has been, we think we can do more. So, our technical development team has been busy providing you with even more ways to socially interact with BHL content.

With the new Facebook “like” button and the Twitter “tweet” buttons:

you now have the opportunity to “like” or “tweet” about specific titles, volumes, or pages you find in our collection. Go to your favorite title in the BHL and try clicking on one of the buttons shown above. You’ll have a new quick and easy way to share about BHL content via your preferred social media platform. More detailed information about our new social media features is forthcoming in a future blog post. Stay tuned.

The New Face of BHL

The new features we’ve added to our website do more to allow our users to interact directly with and support the BHL project. To highlight these changes we’ve adopted a new logo. Working together with our BHL-Australia colleagues, we decided to let go of our old image and adopt a sleeker, more compact one. With this new logo we are putting a fresh “face” forward to welcome the future of exciting new developments for the BHL. Expect more information on our new logo, its origins, and the process we went through to create it, in a later blog post.

As always, we want to hear from you!

If you have any thoughts or comments about today’s changes, or other ideas that you’d like to see implemented, don’t hesitate to send us some feedback or, better yet, tell us via Facebook or Twitter. Thank you for all your interest and support of the BHL. With your help, we will continue to grow and improve for the long road ahead.

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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