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Chris Freeland, Martin Kalfatovic and Keri Thompson attended technical meetings related to the Biodiversity Heritage Library China node, November 15-17, 2010. The meetings, held at the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing) took place over three days and covered scanning workflow, operation of the Internet Archive Scribe machine, technical standards for ingesting BHL-China materials into the BHL portal site, and replicating BHL data on IB/CAS servers.

A promo video for the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Staff of BHL are humbled to announce that we have been recognized by the Society for the History of Natural History for the past three years of efforts on behalf of our digital repository. The John Thackray Medal is especially rewarding to receive because it appreciates the comprehensive nature of our work. BHL is here to support the work of plant, animal and earth scientists alike and the John Thackray Medal is likewise an advocate for the broadest sense of natural history. We sincerely thank the Society for their work as well.

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.

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.

As we know, 2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity. Programming throughout the year in support of all things biodiverse has been wide-ranging. Activities for scientific explorations of climate change and habitat preservation abound as well as opportunities for local involvement and youth directed campaigns, like the 2010 International Biodiversity Art Competition.

On Saturday October 2 and Sunday October 3, 2010, Smithsonian Institution Libraries staff members Polly Lasker and Gil Taylor, plus volunteer John Hejna (Polly’s husband), promoted the Libraries’ services at a booth during the annual Autumn Conservation Festival at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) near Front Royal, Virginia.