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/

On Tuesday there is a review of the BHL-Europe project.  BHL Technical Director Chris Freeland has been closely involved in the project since before it began, having helped identify partners in 2007 who formed the BHL-Europe and submitted a bid to the EU for funding.  Chris was involved in a biking accident two weeks ago and was not able to travel to Berlin, so he put together the following video congratulating the BHL-Europe partners on their achievement:

On Thursday and Friday members of the Global Biodiversity Heritage Library will be meeting to discuss next steps in their ongoing collaboration to build a network of projects working together to digitize and share scientific literature at global scale.  A report of that meeting will be made available via this blog.

Coverage of all events is happening live via Twitter at #bhlib all week.  Be sure to follow @BHLEurope & @BioDivLibrary for other updates regarding BHL activities.

Seeding links from Wikipedia to BHL (2008 – 2012) from Chris Freeland

View more presentations from Chris Freeland.

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.

I describe my methodology in the presentation, but in short, I took a list of the 5,000 most frequently requested Wikipedia pages for the closest time period I could obtain. I then read through that list and extracted out any that had to do with organisms. I learned a lot about humanity reading through those requests – people search for some really, really sick stuff on Wikipedia – but I was able to determine a set of organisms in the search results. If we had scanned the book where that organism was originally described, like Lion, then I added the link to Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae, 1758, as a reference. If we didn’t have the original publication online, like Polar bear, then I linked to the Names Bibliography of that organism, showing where the name is found throughout BHL.

I was going to give this presentation at a conference, but didn’t make it for some reason…and there it sat for 4 years. We’ve recently started talking about doing more linking with Wikipedia and I remembered back to this little exercise and the documentation I had captured at the time. I’ve updated the presentation to look at trends carrying through the end of February 2012, giving a nice 3-4year time frame around which to draw some conclusions.

Have a look, post some comments if you have feedback. Glad the work is finally able to make it into users’ hands!

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.

When you are browsing a book or viewing its bibliographic information, the Mendeley icon appears in the “Connect wth BHL” panel along the left side of the screen.

Take, for example, Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae from 1758:
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/542

Clicking the Mendeley icon automatically adds this title to your Mendeley library. If you don’t have a Mendeley account, you can create one. Once the citation has been imported into Mendeley you can share it with your colleagues, tag it with keywords, or add it to other groups you’ve joined.

You might also consider joining the BHL Group, which includes articles about BHL and related research: http://www.mendeley.com/groups/1477323/biodiversity-heritage-library-bhl/papers/

Including this new feature in BHL helps put our legacy literature into modern systems, and gives you an easy way to incorporate BHL materials into your research.

For enhancements and suggestions for improvement, please leave a comment!

14-15 November, 2011, Field Museum, Chicago, Illinois, USA. http://www.lifeandliterature.org.

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.

A new interface to these data has been moved into production, giving users enhanced functionality in using BHL’s names-based bibliography. Users can now sort records within the results returned, and the results can be exported into a variety of popular reference manager formats including BibTex, EndNote, and a simple CSV file.

You can navigate to the new interface by clicking on Browse By: “Names” or by visiting this link:
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/browse/names

You can also view a sample bibliography of the Great White Shark (Carcharodon carcharias) by following this link:
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/name/carcharodon+carcharias

Please leave comments or questions on this post.

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.

Luckily some new work is happening around OCR and text correction from various projects, including:

• Rod Page’s examples with Wikisource and a Google-like text selector
• National Library of Australia’s Trove project (with their code)
• EU-funded Improving Access to Text (IMPACT) project

The BHL development team and other stakeholders recently highlighted “improvements to OCR text” as an emerging priority for BHL to pursue. Now that we have a sizable repository we’d like to turn development efforts towards enhancing our texts and making them as accurate as possible for our users and data consumers. A subset of BHL is required for various tests and experiments, and that list has begun forming at:
BHL Sample Texts for Retrieval and Evaluation

• https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AiGG0YxTuAn2dGN4R0ZyTTNTZUhfUlU1cHJ3T2JGdUE&hl;=en

If you encounter other texts that pose a unique challenge, please indicate them either via BHL’s Feedback form or on a comment below.