All posts by Mike Lichtenberg

The Global Names Project held a workshop on 17-19 June 2019 on the Campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The workshop was titled Scientific names indexing and data mobilization of Biodiversity Heritage Library using tools from Global Names project and was hosted by the Species File Group at the  Illinois Natural History Survey. Eighteen people attended representing a variety of organizations interested in BHL content: Global Names Architecture, iDigBio, TaxonWorks, UIUC Species File Group, the Illinois Library, Encyclopedia of Life, the DINA Project, the Catalogue of Life, GBIF, Species File Group Argentina, the HathiTrust Research Center, and Global Biotic Interactions.

Version 3 of the BHL API has been launched.

The development of a new API version was spurred by the recent introduction of full-text search to the BHL web site. In addition to the inclusion of full-text search, the entire API has been examined and updated. New methods have been added, existing methods have been modified, and many methods have been dropped entirely (or incorporated into other methods).

We have recently updated BHL to allow us to better handle situations where titles or items are taken offline. The key problem that occurs when things are taken offline is that the links to those items are now broken. Anyone who has linked to those titles/items or uses our data exports and/or APIs to access them is affected.

We’ve been investigating options for storage and distribution of citation data in the Biodiversity Heritage Library. In particular, we are searching for an appropriate “core” format. The thought is that with an appropriately verbose, open, standard core format for our citations, we can transform that format into whatever other format we might want to support. By “verbose”, we mean a format that can support all of the information that we need to preserve. By “open”, we’re looking for a format that’s not tied exclusively to one system or vendor. And by “standard”, we’re hoping to identify a format that is widely recognized by the library community.

I wanted to let everyone know about a change that has been made to the search function of the BHL portal.Until now, letters that include diacritics (for example, ó, ö, è, é, û) were treated differently than letters without diacritics.What this meant is that in order to find titles, authors, or subjects that included diacritics, you had to search for an exact match on the diacritic… for example, to find all titles about “invertebrate zoology”, you had to search twice: once for “invertebrate zoology” and once for “invertebrate zoölogy”. (Or you had to search for something like “invertebrate zo” and hope you didn’t get too much extra stuff in the search results.) Obviously, there are all sorts of problems with this limitation.

Learn more about recent updates to the BHL portal.