All posts in Tech Updates

I wanted to let everyone know about a change that has been made to the search function of the BHL portal.Until now, letters that include diacritics (for example, ó, ö, è, é, û) were treated differently than letters without diacritics.What this meant is that in order to find titles, authors, or subjects that included diacritics, you had to search for an exact match on the diacritic… for example, to find all titles about “invertebrate zoology”, you had to search twice: once for “invertebrate zoology” and once for “invertebrate zoölogy”. (Or you had to search for something like “invertebrate zo” and hope you didn’t get too much extra stuff in the search results.) Obviously, there are all sorts of problems with this limitation.

Following user requests, the BHL exports now include Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and metadata for all pages in the BHL collection.

Last fall developers Ryan Chute and Herbert Van de Sompel from Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Research Library released djatoka, a new Open Source JPEG 2000 image server.

Since the public launch of BHL in Feb 2008, the BHL Technical development team has received repeated requests for an interface that would allow users to download a PDF for an individual article within one of the digitized books in BHL. This is actually a fairly challenging task, as previously reported, but with the right technology and a little bit of luck we’ve devised a solution that is working very well in production and is receiving positive feedback. Here’s how it works.

We have pushed a change to the BHL Portal user interface to enhance usability of our books. The new page is available at:http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/4323Our goal with the improvement was to make the page more visually informative and, at the same time, easier to understand. We also took this opportunity to add in code that makes BHL more readily indexed by Zotero and other reference management applications.

Starting this past June, BHL worked with Qin Wei, a Ph.D. student in Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, to evaluate the taxonomic name finding software and algorithms used to identify scientific names throughout the BHL corpus. This work lead to some interesting findings, which were reported this week via poster and oral presentation at the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) 2008 conference in Fremantle, Australia.

A series of files is now available for download that will enable libraries and other data providers to identify digitized titles available within BHL.

This suite of files also includes metadata about each volume scanned, as well as information about the millions of scientific names that have been identified throughout the BHL corpus and the pages on which those names occur.