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Optical character recognition (OCR) plays a critical part in BHL’s contributions to the scientific community. OCR in and of itself is a remarkable achievement, converting images of typewritten text to computer-readable text with “pretty good” accuracy. OCR on handwritten text is an even greater challenge to address and is beyond the scope of the improvements discussed here. The scientific work that BHL supports demands the best accuracy that we can provide using available tools, and let’s be honest, available budgets.

Recently, our colleagues at the Internet Archive made the transition away from the ABBYY FineReader OCR software to the Tesseract Open Source OCR engine. Over the past year or more, the OCR team at the Internet Archive has adapted and fine-tuned Tesseract to their workflows. Our first impression is that Tesseract OCR is more than “pretty good” in its ability to identify text from the page images provided to it.

The downside to this is that the Internet Archive has rightfully chosen to not re-process all existing text content through the Tesseract OCR engine. This is a prohibitively expensive and time-consuming prospect given that they have 35 million text-based items and reprocessing them would take several years and use up resources that could otherwise be used for gathering new content.

However, in the interests of supporting the efforts of the BHL community, the BHL Tech Team is working with our Internet Archive partner to reprocess some of BHL’s oldest content with the newest available version of Tesseract OCR. We are currently in a testing phase, and this blog post details some of our early results.

For the first time, the Biodiversity Heritage Library held its annual meeting in conjunction with a major biodiversity/natural sciences organization. In June 2022, BHL joined with the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) and the Natural Sciences Collections Society (NatSCA) to host our meetings in Edinburgh, Scotland. Recognizing that the global pandemic had forced so many meetings to turn to virtual, we were fortunate to have this 2022 meeting as a hybrid virtual/in-person event.

Our latest bi-annual newsletter is now available! From welcoming new staff to celebrating major milestones, don’t miss the latest news from the BHL community.

View our May 2022 Bi-annual Newsletter.

It seems like we are on an anniversary splurge. In April, I marked my 10th year as BHL Program Director. Today is a more important date in BHL history. May 9, 2007 marked the official launch of BHL content on the web. We celebrated that day with one of our first BHL blog posts (Biodiversity Heritage Library and Encyclopedia of Life Launch!). On that launch date, BHL had 306 titles, 3,236 volumes, and 1,271,664 pages of taxonomic literature. Today, BHL has grown to become a global consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries and hosts over 60 million pages and more than 281,000 volumes.

Growing out of the vision of Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson for an “encyclopedia of life” that would provide a page for every species, BHL joined forces with a nascent Encyclopedia of Life in 2006. Under the guidance of Cristián Samper (National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution) and leaders from four additional cornerstone institutions (the Field Museum, Harvard University, the Marine Biological Laboratory, and the Missouri Botanical Garden), BHL served as the literature cornerstone of EOL. BHL and EOL received vital funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the switch was flipped on an important new player in the biodiversity landscape at a celebration hosted by the National Academy of Sciences.

This month (April 2022) marks my tenth year as the BHL Program Director. Over the past 10 years, we’ve seen a lot of change — and a lot of growth — with the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Taking over from our first Program Director, Tom Garnett, was a daunting challenge. Tom led the initial funding of BHL through the MacArthur Foundation grant with the Encyclopedia of Life and the establishment of BHL as a global consortium.

Among my first tasks as BHL Program Director was to build on that legacy with the transition of BHL from a grant funded organization to a member-driven one. Likewise, those first months of my tenure saw the close out of the BHL Europe project (which led to our continued strong European presence) and the planning meetings (and later launch) of BHL Africa.

The BHL Tech Team is pleased to announce a new form of content available in BHL: Article PDFs. While this may not sound like anything new, after all, we have had a tool to download PDF content for some time, this update changes both how the PDFs are created and maintained, and how BHL is viewed by content aggregators on the internet, most notably Unpaywall.

Blandowski’s Catalogue is one of the most precious items held by the Museums Victoria Archives. It documents natural history specimens collected by William Blandowski (1822-1878) and Gerard Krefft (1830-1881) and colleagues working with First Peoples communities for the National Museum of Victoria (predecessor of Museums Victoria) during an expedition along the Lower Murray and Darling River from December 1856 to December 1857. Murray fishes listed in the Catalogue were later controversially used to describe prominent members of the Philosophical Institute in Blandowski’s 1858 paper Recent Discoveries in Natural History on the Lower Murray. Blandowski refused to hand-over to Professor Frederick McCoy, the National Museum of Victoria’s first Director, many of the specimens collected on the expedition, and associated research notes and illustrations, causing further controversy. Blandowski’s Catalogue has recently been digitised by BHL Australia and is now available to view online.