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An important feature of the Biodiversity Heritage Library that sets it apart from other mass digitization projects is our incorporation of algorithms and services to mine taxonomically-relevant data from of the 2.9 million (as of the date of this posting) pages digitized through our partnership with the Internet Archive.

BHL developers have released several significant updates to the BHL portal today. These updates include:For a complete list of bugs and enhancements included in this release, visit our issue tracking web site.

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 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.

“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.”

We’ve released new functionality in BHL to allow users to search across all the scientific names we’ve indexed throughout our digital library and view a bibliography of occurrences – what we’re tentatively calling a “discovered bibliography”.