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Featured Books
    All Featured Books
    Book of the Month Series
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    Garden Stories
    Monsters Are Real
    Page Frights
    Her Natural History
    Earth Optimism 2020
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Visit BHL
  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
  • User Stories
  • Campaigns
    • Fossil Stories
    • Garden Stories
    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
  • Tech Blog
  • Visit BHL
Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts in BHL News

BHL News, Blog Reel

BHL Bi-annual Newsletter (June 2023) Now Available!

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Our latest bi-annual newsletter is now available! From BHL Day 2023 in Paris to releasing the new Ukrainian Українська Collection, don’t miss the latest news from the BHL community.

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June 2, 2023byColleen Funkhouser
BHL News, Blog Reel

2023 BHL Annual Meeting – Together Again in Paris

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Originally scheduled for 2020, the BHL Annual Meeting finally made it to Paris after two years of virtual meetings and a break to hold the 2022 BHL Annual Meeting in conjunction with the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) and the Natural Sciences Collections Society (NatSCA) meetings in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The host for the 2023 meeting was the library of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle (MNHN), led by Alice Lemaire, Clément Oury, and Gildas Illien. The meeting took place 17-21 April 2023 and included BHL business meetings, tours of library and museum sites, and a BHL symposium titled “Fostering Data Driven Natural Science through Open Digital Libraries”. In total, the meeting gathered 38 attendees (both in-person and virtually) from 22 BHL partners from around the world.

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May 24, 2023byMartin R. Kalfatovic
BHL News, Blog Reel, Featured Books

Ukrainian Українська Collection

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Through ongoing collaborative collection building and digitization, the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Library (NAL) is partnering with the Biodiversity Heritage Library to support biodiversity and scientific research in Ukraine with the release of the Ukrainian Українська Collection. BHL and NAL stand with the people of Ukraine and echo the support of its consortium partner institutions in their condemnation of the Russian Federation’s invasion.

The threat to Ukraine’s cultural heritage materials remains substantial during the wartime humanitarian crisis. Many libraries and cultural heritage institutions throughout Ukraine have been severely damaged or destroyed, resulting in the permanent loss of culturally and scientifically significant content. Through the digitization of historic materials related to biodiversity research in Ukraine, this project will help support Ukraine’s scientific community by providing access to these important resources.

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April 4, 2023byClayton Ruminski and Bianca Crowley
BHL News, Blog Reel, Tech Updates

BHL is Round Tripping Persistent Identifiers with the Wikidata Query Service

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In the Spring of 2022, the BHL Cataloging and Metadata Committee investigated the possibility of harvesting persistent identifiers (PIDs) from Wikidata as part of the group’s longstanding project to disambiguate and deduplicate author records in the BHL database. The motivation behind this one-time experimental data harvest was to see if BHL could:

  1. Enhance BHL author records with additional PID data points;
  2. Improve the committee’s ability to disambiguate author names in the BHL database; and
  3. Respond to an outstanding user request from two of Wikimedia’s super star editors, Siobhan Leachman and Andy Mabbett, to expose BHL’s author data on BHL and include hyperlinks to other authoritative knowledge bases on the web.

In particular, Wikimedians wanted to see the Wikidata Q identifier exposed, providing a link to the corresponding creator item record in Wikidata.

There are multiple motivations for undertaking this work. By adding the BHL Creator ID to the corresponding Wikidata item, Wikidata editors help link BHL to the richer biographical data about that person held in Wikidata. The Wikidata item for a person may contain links to their Wikipedia page or to images of the person held in the image repository Wikimedia Commons. Wikidata items also act as identifier hubs and contain links to other databases and identifiers.

By adding the BHL Creator ID to this list of identifiers, the Wikidata editor is linking the content held in BHL to the content held in multiple other datasets and repositories.

These extra author data points provide Wikimedians and BHL catalogers with crucial clues that aid in name disambiguation. In particular, hyperlinks to other knowledge bases are incredibly valuable because they lead to new knowledge pathways that help confirm a person’s identity in a complex game of “Who’s Who?”

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February 15, 2023byJJ Dearborn and Siobhan Leachman
BHL News, Blog Reel, Tech Updates

Providing More Robust Data in BHL’s OAI-PMH Dublin Core Feed

Recently, BHL performed a comprehensive review of all live data feeds and outputs to ensure that we are providing robust metadata to our downstream consumers. Live BHL data can be found at BHL’s Developer and Data Tools. BHL’s live data outputs include:

  • API v3
  • OAI-PMH

OAI-PMH is an acronym for the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. It allows other discovery services and aggregators to harvest BHL’s metadata in standard formats such as Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) and Dublin Core (DC).

To provide more robust data in BHL’s OAI-PMH Dublin Core feed, three changes have been made to the feed:

  1. Creative Commons (CC) license information was added as a second <rights> element;
  2. A <relation> element was added to titles that are part of a monographic series, allowing BHL to model more complex bibliographic relationships that exist in the BHL database; and
  3. A non-standard “type” attribute was removed from the <relation> element for parts.

Important: If you are a developer, using the non-standard “type” attribute in your code at the part-level, this is a breaking change. Please take note and update your code accordingly.

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February 3, 2023byJJ Dearborn
BHL News, Blog Reel, Tech Updates

BHL Technical Development: Year in Review

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For BHL, 2022 was a year to focus on critical upgrades for the BHL platform to ensure the sustainability of our services for our global users. Although BHL’s basic technical infrastructure remains the same, consisting of years of refinement, knowledge, and reliability, a few updates were definitely in order. Most of these upgrades were “behind-the-scenes” work and would not be noticeable to a majority of our users. However, keeping up with these important enhancements is a crucial component of any technology project.

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January 31, 2023byJJ Dearborn
BHL News, Blog Reel

In Memoriam: David Remsen. BHL has lost one of its key founding figures

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Last week, the biodiversity informatics community and BHL lost one of its most creative minds. David Remsen lost his lifelong battle with mental illness and passed away on Wednesday, December 14, 2022. As a staff member of the MBLWHOI Library working with BHL’s inaugural Vice-Chair, Cathy Norton, David’s innovative and groundbreaking work in taxonomic name finding (uBio) and parsing taxonomic index (Nomenclature Zoologicus) laid the groundwork for much of BHL’s taxonomic infrastructure powered by the Global Names Architecture.

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December 20, 2022byMartin R. Kalfatovic
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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. Headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, D.C., BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”

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