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In November 2009, the BHL started ingesting biodiversity related content from the Internet Archive. Since then, the BHL collection has grown significantly. Each week, the BHL brings in new content from the Internet Archive based on a criteria of selected Library of Congress Subject Headings and call numbers, with the aim of bringing in content related to the literature of biological diversity.

So, many of you participated in our BHL User Survey 2010, and we greatly appreciate your contributions! One of the most prevalent themes throughout the range of responses that we received was that our users want to be able to submit requests for scanning. So, you spoke; we listened. Introducing the new scanning request form on BHL!

New updates have been released for the BHL API, plus new documentation about data exports and other services are now available on the Developer Tools and API section of the BHL wiki.

BHL has released a beta version of its OpenURL Resolver API for testing. A full description of the service is available at http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/openurlhelp.aspx. Any repository containing citations to biodiversity literature can use this API to determine whether a given book, volume, article, and/or page is available online through BHL. The service supports both OpenURL 0.1 and OpenURL 1.0 query formats, and can return its response in JSON, XML, or HTML format, providing flexibility for data exchange.

BHL developers have incorporated the Internet Archive’s open source book viewing application into the BHL portal, providing a new interface for using BHL’s digital books.

We’ve been investigating options for storage and distribution of citation data in the Biodiversity Heritage Library. In particular, we are searching for an appropriate “core” format. The thought is that with an appropriately verbose, open, standard core format for our citations, we can transform that format into whatever other format we might want to support. By “verbose”, we mean a format that can support all of the information that we need to preserve. By “open”, we’re looking for a format that’s not tied exclusively to one system or vendor. And by “standard”, we’re hoping to identify a format that is widely recognized by the library community.

In previous posts we have discussed the issues surrounding the identification of articles contained within BHL scanned books and the new interface we’ve developed that let’s users build their own PDFs for download. In that interface(demo for The Journal of agricultural science, v.7) we ask users who are building a PDF of an article to contribute the article title, author(s), and subjects/tags and we’ll store that information alongside the generated PDF and make it available for other users to search and download.