We’ve expanded the BHL FAQ, providing answers to the most common questions we receive from our users. The FAQ is the best place to find answers to your questions about BHL, our collection, and our services.
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:
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.
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.
The development of a new API version was spurred by the recent introduction of full-text search to the BHL web site. In addition to the inclusion of full-text search, the entire API has been examined and updated. New methods have been added, existing methods have been modified, and many methods have been dropped entirely (or incorporated into other methods).
We’re thrilled to announce that full text search is now available on the Biodiversity Heritage Library!
With this new functionality, search results in the library will display hits for your term in both the bibliographic information (i.e. title, author, subject, publisher, related titles and series, etc.) as well as the full text of books in BHL.
The BHL API will be updated on 12 June 2017. The current Contributor element will be replaced with a HoldingInstitution element in the result sets of the following API methods:GetItemMetadataGetItemByIdentifierGetTitleMetadataGetTitleItemsBookSearchNameGetDetailHere is an example of the change:Current API Response:<Contributor>MBLWHOI Library</Contributor><RightsHolder>MBLWHOI Library</RightsHolder>
The dawn of a new year is an exciting time – a time to look forward to new possibilities and embark on new initiatives. Sometimes, however, it can also be tinged with sadness as these new beginnings may require us to say goodbye as well. For us at BHL, 2016 will also mean saying goodbye to William Ulate as our Technical Director.
I also had the luck to attend the TDWG Annual Conference in Florence, Italy this past October/November 2013. This year’s topic was “Virtual Communities for Biodiversity Science”, a very relevant topic for BHL and one notable difference of this year’s meeting, compared to the last three years I have attended, was the numerous Symposia and Workshops organized by several communities within biodiversity informatics.
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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