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News
Featured Books
    All Featured Books
    Book of the Month Series
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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
  • 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

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BHL News, Blog Reel, Tech Updates

BHL is Round Tripping Persistent Identifiers with the Wikidata Query Service

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In the Spring of 2022, the BHL Cataloging and Metadata Committee investigated the possibility of harvesting persistent identifiers (PIDs) from Wikidata as part of the group’s longstanding project to disambiguate and deduplicate author records in the BHL database. The motivation behind this one-time experimental data harvest was to see if BHL could:

  1. Enhance BHL author records with additional PID data points;
  2. Improve the committee’s ability to disambiguate author names in the BHL database; and
  3. Respond to an outstanding user request from two of Wikimedia’s super star editors, Siobhan Leachman and Andy Mabbett, to expose BHL’s author data on BHL and include hyperlinks to other authoritative knowledge bases on the web.

In particular, Wikimedians wanted to see the Wikidata Q identifier exposed, providing a link to the corresponding creator item record in Wikidata.

There are multiple motivations for undertaking this work. By adding the BHL Creator ID to the corresponding Wikidata item, Wikidata editors help link BHL to the richer biographical data about that person held in Wikidata. The Wikidata item for a person may contain links to their Wikipedia page or to images of the person held in the image repository Wikimedia Commons. Wikidata items also act as identifier hubs and contain links to other databases and identifiers.

By adding the BHL Creator ID to this list of identifiers, the Wikidata editor is linking the content held in BHL to the content held in multiple other datasets and repositories.

These extra author data points provide Wikimedians and BHL catalogers with crucial clues that aid in name disambiguation. In particular, hyperlinks to other knowledge bases are incredibly valuable because they lead to new knowledge pathways that help confirm a person’s identity in a complex game of “Who’s Who?”

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February 15, 2023byJJ Dearborn and Siobhan Leachman
BHL News, Blog Reel, Tech Updates

What Is BHL’s New Persistent Identifier Working Group DOI’ng?

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In October 2020, BHL launched a new working group with a momentous goal: to make the content on BHL persistently discoverable, citable and trackable using DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers).

A DOI is like an electronic fingerprint in the form of a unique and permanent alphanumeric string that provides a persistent link to a piece of content online. Modern publications receive a DOI at the point of publication. A DOI is a key part of a publication’s bibliographic metadata and should be included in any mention or citation of that publication. Reference lists in modern publications are filled with DOIs, which allows readers to click from publication to publication in (in theory) a never-ending chain of knowledge.

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May 10, 2021byNicole Kearney
BHL News, Blog Reel, Tech Updates

Updates to Bibliography Pages in BHL

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We have updated the bibliography pages in BHL to streamline the presentation of information about and metadata export options for content in the Library.

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February 11, 2021byGrace Costantino
BHL News, Blog Reel

BHL Records Now Available in WorldCat

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BHL is pleased to announce that it has added its bibliographic records to OCLC’s WorldCat® database, “the world’s largest network of library content and services.” You can now find BHL e-books via https://www.worldcat.org/. With thousands of libraries worldwide participating in OCLC, contributing our records to this “global library cooperative” allows us to extend the discoverability and access of BHL e-books through its variety of tools and services.

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March 31, 2020byBianca Crowley
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.
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April 3, 2019byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel

Reflecting back on my incredible summer at Smithsonian Libraries

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As the weather in Central New York is getting colder, and the winter is inevitably approaching, I can’t help but recall the humid summer of Washington, DC. Over the summer of 2016, I interned at Smithsonian Libraries. As a summer intern, I worked at the Department of Digital Programs and Initiatives on the “Cataloging across collections” project. The project was focused on metadata and cataloging. During my internship I worked on digital curation of the records in Biodiversity Heritage Library as well as cataloging field notes for the Field Book Project.
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December 28, 2016byNura Agzamova
Blog Reel, User Stories

Finding Agriculture among Biodiversity: Metadata in Practice

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library is committed to providing free and open access to over 500 years of natural history literature from across the globe. Towards that goal, the Library currently contains over 45 million pages of biodiversity content, representing over 155,000 volumes and 90,000 titles. However, hosting the content online is just part of our vision to “inspire discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge.” Users must be able to identify content relevant to their work and interest from amongst this vast corpus.
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January 20, 2015byGrace Costantino
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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. Headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, D.C., 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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