Welcome to the Biodiversity Heritage Library Blog

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.

WonderFetch is the term used for prepopulating the Internet Archives metadata forms (so named because it is more wonderful than regular z39.50 fetching). Using WonderFetch, partner libraries can populate fields with data that would not normally be populated as part of the standard IA process, and then store those values in the foobar_meta.xml file alongside each scanned item in the IA repository. Part of the impetus for implementing WonderFetch was not just to automate the inclusion of volume and issue information for serials – which was important – but to also capture due diligence, rights, and licensing information related to each item. (And yes, the TM is a little joke! No rights reserved).

Following some excellent suggestions gathered at a recent Encyclopedia of Life meeting, we’ve made changes to our Google Maps browse interface. To recap, we take Library of Congress Subject Headings and geocode and map them using the Google Maps API (details here).

Learn more about recent updates to the BHL portal.

Learn more about the BHL harvest process from Internet Archive.

An important feature of the Biodiversity Heritage Library that sets it apart from other mass digitization projects is our incorporation of algorithms and services to mine taxonomically-relevant data from of the 2.9 million (as of the date of this posting) pages digitized through our partnership with the Internet Archive.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Encyclopedia of Life shared a table at the Congressional Family Night held at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.