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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
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  • 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
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Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

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BHL News, Blog Reel

Constance Rinaldo, Immediate Past Chair, BHL Executive Committee, has died

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It is with unbelievable sadness that we pass along the news that Constance Rinaldo, in so many ways the heart of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, has died after a rapid and sudden illness. After some glimmers of hope that she might recover, she passed away on Thursday, October 27th. Connie’s family expects celebrations of her life in Boston, New Hampshire, and Maine.

BHL Executive Committee Chair, David Iggulden (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew), noted:

“Connie was a wonderful colleague and friend and her passion for all things BHL was highly infectious. I know that many of us will have very fond memories of attending various events with Connie or jointly presenting with her on BHL activities and developments. I personally have learnt so much from her during my time on the Executive and was always inspired by her drive to track down new opportunities for collaboration, development, or promotion of BHL.”

After her family and friends, BHL was Connie’s greatest passion and we are all better for that passion. As BHL Program Director since 2012, looking beyond daily administrative challenges is sometimes difficult. Connie was invaluable in reminding us all of the higher goals, the higher purpose, that BHL was committed to: BHL’s service to our library partners, to our global audience of researchers, and to making progress, however small, on the great challenges facing our planet and the organisms we share it with.

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October 31, 2022byMartin R. Kalfatovic
Blog Reel, Featured Books

The Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera: A Story of Pirate Publishers, ISSN Hijacking and Fraudulent DOI Assignment

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In 2017, The Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera published its final issue. The journal’s website was turned off and, to ensure ongoing access to the biodiversity knowledge contained within its articles, all volumes (1-49) were made freely available on BHL. The final editorial, entitled “JRL R.I.P.” was written by Rudolf H. T. Mattoni, the then President of the Lepidoptera Research Foundation. You can find it on BHL here.

Jump forward five years. On 4 January 2022, Scott Miller (@PNGmoths) tweeted about the sad passing of his friend Rudolf H. T. Mattoni (1927-2022). Miller’s tweet prompted the realisation (by Roderic Page) that a “bad actor” had resurrected the Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera website and had been using the journal’s title and ISSN to publish new articles. From 2018 onward, the fraudulent party published 262 articles in six issues across two volumes. These articles were not about lepidoptera (butterflies and moths); they covered a seemingly random array of topics, including economics, health, and business management.

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October 11, 2022byNicole Kearney
Blog Reel, Tech Updates

OCR Improvements: An Early Analysis

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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.

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July 19, 2022byJoel Richard
BHL News, Blog Reel

2022 BHL Annual Meeting — A Global Hybrid

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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.

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June 30, 2022byMartin R. Kalfatovic
BHL News, Blog Reel

BHL Bi-annual Newsletter (May 2022) Now Available!

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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.

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May 12, 2022byColleen Funkhouser
BHL News, Blog Reel

The Vast Library of Life: 15 Years of the BHL Portal

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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.

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May 9, 2022byMartin R. Kalfatovic
BHL News, Blog Reel

10 Years of BHL Growth and Transformation While Program Director

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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.

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April 27, 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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