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    All Featured Books
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  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
  • User Stories
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    • Garden Stories
    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
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Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts tagged with technical-development

BHL News, Blog Reel, Tech Updates

BHL Improves the Speed and Accuracy of its Taxonomic Name Finding Services with gnfinder

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BHL has deployed a new taxonomic name finding tool to improve the speed and accuracy of identifying names throughout its 58+ million pages.

BHL is now usingGlobal Names Architecture’s (GNA) gnfinder tool to locate taxonomic names in the BHL corpus. Prior to this deployment, BHL’s name finding services were based on an index of scientific names created by GNA developers six years ago by parsing every page in BHL one by one. This took 45 days to accomplish, and the cost of repeating this process made updating or improving the index infeasible.

The gnfinder tool uses fast, scalable programming languages to significantly reduce computational time. Using Open Source applications in Go and Scala, the tool detects candidate scientific names and compares them to millions of scientific name-strings aggregated by GNA for verification. The new process decreases the time needed for name detection and name verification from 35 days to 5 hours and from 7 days to 12 hours, respectively. As a result, the entire BHL corpus can now be indexed in less than a day, compared to the 45 days needed for the previous index. Additionally, by significantly reducing computational time, implementing iterative improvements to the index is now achievable.

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July 21, 2020byGrace Costantino
BHL News, Blog Reel, Tech Updates

BHL Participates in the Global Names Workshop

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The Global Names Project held a workshop on 17-19 June 2019 on the Campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The workshop was titled Scientific names indexing and data mobilization of Biodiversity Heritage Library using tools from Global Names project and was hosted by the Species File Group at the  Illinois Natural History Survey. Eighteen people attended representing a variety of organizations interested in BHL content: Global Names Architecture, iDigBio, TaxonWorks, UIUC Species File Group, the Illinois Library, Encyclopedia of Life, the DINA Project, the Catalogue of Life, GBIF, Species File Group Argentina, the HathiTrust Research Center, and Global Biotic Interactions.

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July 15, 2019byJoel Richard, Matt Yoder, Deborah Paul, Jorrit Poelen and Mike Lichtenberg
BHL News, Blog Reel

We’ve Expanded the BHL FAQ!

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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.

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July 8, 2019byGrace Costantino
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
BHL News, Blog Reel, Tech Updates

Version 3 of the BHL API Now Available

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Version 3 of the BHL API has been launched.

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).

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September 10, 2018byMike Lichtenberg
BHL News, Blog Reel, Tech Updates

Announcing Full Text Search on BHL!

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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.

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May 7, 2018byGrace Costantino
BHL News, Blog Reel, Tech Updates

Changes Coming to the BHL API on 12 June 2017

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>
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June 5, 2017byMichelle Strizever
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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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