Welcome to the Biodiversity Heritage Library Blog

Sometime over the past weekend, the Biodiversity Heritage Library portal loaded it’s 10 millionth page!

Due to the way volumes are ingested from the various scanning centers, it’s a bit tricky to pick which was the EXCACT 10 millionth page, but for the sake of this blog post, I’m going to say that it was one of the pages of Coleopterorum catalogus by Junk and Schenkling. I’m picking this item because, as you taxonomic cognoscenti out there know, beetles (coleoptera) represent, perhaps, the most common type of animal. Indeed, the noted biologist J.B.S. Haldane is reputed to have quipped that, if nothing else, nature reveals that God has “an inordinate fondness for beetles.”

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.

Many researchers are used to searching or browsing for materials by article. Article level access to BHL content is a goal that we’re striving for, and one that we haven’t yet reached!BHL is a mass scanning operation. Our member libraries are moving as quickly as possible through a range of materials – books, serials, etc. – in order to scan as much as possible during our relatively brief window of funding. Our goal is to scan & cache now, then add in advanced technology solutions for secondary post-processing as they are developed.

The latest revision of the BHL Data Model is now available for review.

A revised diagram & description of the BHL hardware architecture is available.

Note: This is a revision of our previous blog post that described our process for harvesting digitized books from the Internet Archive. Their query interface changed, and we’ve updated our process & documentation accordingly.