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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.

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.