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The NC State Insect Museum blog gave the Biodiversity Heritage Library

The Missouri Botanical Garden (MOBOT), located in St. Louis, MO, is seeking to hire a Senior Programmer Analyst to work on several large biodiversity informatics projects, including the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) online at www.biodiversitylibrary.org.

The BHL (http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/About.aspx) currently consists of English language collections from the USA and UK (although we have huge amounts of material in over 40 other languages). I am working with European colleagues to develop a programme of activity in Europe to cover the other European languages. German and Netherlands colleagues are already working on bids and trial scanning. We are preparing a bid to the EU eContentplus programme for money to manage these activities across Europe (unfortunately, the EU will not fund scanning directly) and this will be lead by the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin.

The name services are XML-based web services that can be invoked via SOAP or HTTP GET/POST requests. Responses can be received in one of three formats: XML wrapped in a SOAP envelope, XML, or JSON.

A characteristic of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) that distinguishes it from other mass digitization projects is the incorporation of service-based algorithms to identify scientific name strings throughout digitized content. These ‘taxonomically intelligent’ services, powered by uBio.org’s TaxonFinder and NameBank, have been incorporated into the BHL Portal to provide names-based interfaces into taxonomic literature.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History hosted a day long symposium to celebrate 300 years of Linnaean taxonomy. In addition to the symposium, the museum featured an exhibition of a 1st Edition of Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae. The exhibition, “A Tribute to Carl Linnaeus, 1707-1778” (November 13-14) features the author’s own copy of Systema Naturae (courtesy of the Swedish Embassy), with illustrations by Georg Dionysius Ehret. At the evening reception, the Biodiversity Heritage Library displayed the online version of the 1758 edition of Systema (from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library) and there was also an appearance by Linnaeus [as envisioned by Hans Odöö].

“This site displays an elegantly designed simplicity that the web developer in me finds irresistible. It’s a marketing nightmare, but a researcher’s dream – a system to quickly and easily find the information you want with minimal distractions.”