A revised diagram & description of the BHL hardware architecture is available at:
http://www.slideshare.net/chrisfreeland/bhl-architecture-july-2008/
Following some excellent suggestions gathered at a recent Encyclopedia of Life meeting, we’ve made changes to our Google Maps browse interface. To recap, we take Library of Congress Subject Headings and geocode and map them using the Google Maps API (details here).
Now that we’re managing nearly 10,000 volumes the standard Google Maps interface was getting cluttered and clunky, so we’ve refined the interface to show smaller points, weight the results using color, and display links to the titles for a given subject heading within the map itself (as demonstrated for “Africa” above). To view the map in full, visit http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/browse/map.
We made another change based on requests to view full bibliographic details for a scanned title. When we harvest scans from the Internet Archive, we copy the MARCXML for the title to our servers and siphon off just enough of the metadata to facilitate our browse & search capabilities – to pull in the contents of the entire MARCXML would unnecessarily bloat our database with info we don’t expect to search across or expose via browse. But, it’s important data to have in the display, so we’ve skinned the MARCXML using XSLTs provided by the Library of Congress. To view in action, click the “Brief|Detailed|MARC” links at http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/1583, or for any title in our collection.
Finally, we’ve enhanced the display for our Discovered Bibliographies to return results in a more performant way, providing more visual feedback to the user that processes are at work. To view the refined interface, visit the result for Pomatomus saltatrix at http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/name/Pomatomus_saltatrix.
The following page from Biologia Centrali Americana, Insecta Lepidoptera-Heterocera v. 4 shows an interesting example of a proximity search we’d like to support with BHL Name Services – “find species x within n characters/words of species y.”
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/593637
Halfway through the entry for Lineodes integra you’ll see a character that looks like a crosshair, followed by “Solanum spp. 4-5,8, S. radula4-5, S. jasminifolium4-5, S. tuberosum (=Potato)8.” According to Wolfram Mey, the leading lepidopterist of the Museum of Natural History (MfN), Berlin:
The symbol means that the species has been reared from/on the particular plant. The symbol has been in use particularly by the old British authors, particularly Lord Walsingham, and is also used on the labels attached to the specimens. (translation by Dr. Michael Ohl)
What this tells us is Lineodes integra (Eggplant Leafroller Moth) is reared on a variety of Solanum species, including Solanum tuberosum (Potato). This example was uncovered during a Name search for Solanum tuberosum; the resulting bibliography included a link to this volume on insects from the Biologia Centrali-Americana, which seemed unusual given the search was for a plant species. This demonstrates why we’d want to facilitate proximity searches, so that users could find pages where both Lineodes integra and Solanum tuberosum occurred to aid in the discovery of predator-prey, plant-pollinator, or other coevolutionary relationships.
This example also suggests that our OCR algorithms are woefully inadequate to infer these kinds of relationships through automated means; the crosshair symbol was identified as ©.
