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BHL has used name finding algorithms that analyze all of the scanned pages in BHL and extract out the scientific names within. This functionality was released in 2007 and has received minor enhancements in usability. To date more than 81 million potential name strings have been identified by the TaxonFinder algorithm, representing 1.6 million unique names.

As has been previously discussed, BHL has uncorrected text generated by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software for each of its scanned volumes, and that uncorrected text has implications for data mining and accurate search. OCR results are notoriously poor because the technology hasn’t improved much since it was “solved” for forms processing in the mid-1980’s, which doesn’t really help BHL at all with our challenge of getting accurate text for our heterogeneous digital library spanning more than 500 years of printed publications.

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.