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News
Featured Books
    All Featured Books
    Book of the Month Series
    BHL at 20
User Stories
Campaigns
    Fossil Stories
    Garden Stories
    Monsters Are Real
    Page Frights
    Her Natural History
    Earth Optimism 2020
Tech Blog
Visit BHL
  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
    • BHL at 20
  • User Stories
  • Campaigns
    • Fossil Stories
    • Garden Stories
    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
  • Tech Blog
  • Visit BHL
Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL
BHL News, Blog Reel, Tech Updates

Additions to Text Exports Coming Soon

The BHL website was recently updated for new fields to download content. The TSV Data Exports are being updated on 1 September 2019 to mirror this change.

History

Recently, we added new URLs to the site to facilitate getting the text, Images or PDFs of the items at BHL. When viewing an item (for example, Darwin’s Origin of Species), the Download Contents > Download Book option presents four choices for downloading the contents of an item. Three of these have new, normalized URLs to download the content of an item.

  • PDF: https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/itempdf/124544
  • All: (unchanged)
  • JPEG 2000: https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/itemimages/124544
  • Text: https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/itemtext/124544

We added these links because we discovered that there were some inconsistencies in connecting our content to the Internet Archive. Additionally with the new ability of BHL Partners to upload transcribed text, we needed a method of downloading the updated text rather than the original OCR.

What has changed?

In summary, these three new URLs have been added to the tab-delimited Item (volumes) TSV download files. The presence of these fields will impact any downstream processes that rely on the order of the fields. Please review your code if you rely on the field order instead of the field names of the TSV file.

In the past, the fields were:

ItemID, TitleID, ThumbnailPageID, BarCode, MARCItemID, CallNumber, VolumeInfo, ItemURL, LocalID, Year, InstitutionName, ZQuery, CreationDate

On 1 September 2019, the fields will change to the following:

ItemID, TitleID, ThumbnailPageID, BarCode, MARCItemID, CallNumber, VolumeInfo, ItemURL, ItemTextURL, ItemPDFURL, ItemImagesURL, LocalID, Year, InstitutionName, ZQuery, CreationDate

These fields mirror those of the new links mentioned above and will save you from needing to create the URLs to download content.

Please update your code or processes if necessary!

August 27, 2019by Sheila Rabun
BHL News, Blog Reel, Tech Updates

Changes Coming to the BHL Data Exports Files on 10 April 2019

On 10 April 2019, we will implement additions and changes to the export files available from the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

The updates involve the following:

  1. A new set of exports will be created alongside the existing exports. The new set will contain only data for material that is hosted by BHL. No externally-hosted content will be included in these files. Because these files are added in addition to the existing export files, no existing users should be affected.
  2. The BHL author Identifiers will be added to the creator.txt and partcreator.txt tab-delimited files. The format of these files will change to accommodate the additional data; the author identifier will now be the second “column” in each file. Because of this, anyone regularly harvesting from these files may be affected.

Additional detailed information about these updates will be reflected on the Data Exports: Developer and Data Tools webpage, effective 10 April 2019.

If you have questions, please feel free to submit feedback via this form.

April 3, 2019by michelle.underhill
BHL News, Blog Reel, Tech Updates

Announcing the New “About BHL” Site!

About BHL homepage

Homepage for the new “About BHL” site.

We’re excited to announce the launch of the new “About BHL” site!

What is BHL’s history? Who’s involved in the Library? What tools and services does BHL offer? How do you search, download content or access data and developer tools in BHL? How can you get involved in the Library? What projects has BHL engaged in?

Find the answers to these questions and much more information about the Biodiversity Heritage Library on our new “About BHL” site at about.biodiversitylibrary.org!

The new “About” site, which lives alongside and is linked from the BHL website at biodiversitylibrary.org, replaces our previous wiki-based “About BHL” pages and features several improved features and functionality. Read on to learn more about some of these new features.

New Look & Feel

The site has been designed to mirror the look of the BHL website. We’ve also integrated our social accounts into the site with streams for our Instagram, Twitter and blog feeds in the right sidebar. Also, check out our testimonials feed above the footer to learn more about BHL’s impact on global research from real users!

testimonials feed on new About site

Testimonials feed on new “About BHL” site.

Improved Navigation

With our new top menu and category-specific sidebar menus, it’s now easier than ever to navigate through our “About” content and find exactly what you need. But just in case you still can’t find what you’re looking for, we’ve placed a prominent “Contact Us” button in the header.

Consolidated Tools & Services

tools and services landing page on the new About site.

Tools and services landing page on the new “About BHL” site.

We consolidated links to information about our various tools and services into a single landing page to make it easier for you to explore what BHL has to offer and find the services you need.

New FAQ Center

We’ve created a new FAQ center to help answer some of the most frequent questions we receive. We’ll continue to add to this FAQ with new questions as appropriate. Have a question you don’t see listed? Send us feedback and we can add it!

Have questions or comments about the new “About BHL” site? Feel free to contact us or leave a comment on this post.

September 17, 2018by michelle.underhill
BHL News, Blog Reel, Tech Updates

Notice: Changes Coming to BHL API Methods on February 27, 2017

Effective February 27, 2017, the API methods GetPartEndNote and GetTitleEndNote will be removed. In addition, the BHL data exports that used the related format have already been removed.

The removed BHL API methods and data exports will soon be replaced by methods and exports that use the RIS format, which is supported by a wider range of bibliographic reference managers.

Thank you for your patience as we work to implement the RIS-based exports and API methods. If you have any questions, please submit them via our feedback form.

You can learn more about our developer tools and APIs here.

February 24, 2017by ulib-libraryjobs

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About BHL

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”

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