Welcome to the Biodiversity Heritage Library Blog

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.

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.