Arno River in Florence, Italy

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.

Definitely a big pool of topics for choosing what to attend, from sustainability issues on International e-Collaborations to several talks on tools, methods and experiences with Data Quality. Some sessions presented proposals to document Darwin Core, another wanted to cover the minimum information standard for biological collections beyond the Darwin Core while still another stated further requirements for the Darwin Archives star schema .  There were expositions of interesting experiences in crowdsourcing websites and coordinating their communities and even a symposium and small hackathon to crowdsource the construction of a common vocabulary for biodiversity.  The list goes on and on and makes for an excellent up-to-date resource to read about the latest and greatest in biodiversity informatics!

BHL hosted its own Symposium: “Crafting the future of a Global Biodiversity Library for diverse community’s needs: the case of scientists.” The panel discussed how the needs of the scientific community have guided BHL’s approach, not only this past year, but also how we’re looking to address those needs in the future.  Make sure to read the insightful presentations linked from the previous post by our BHL Program Director, Martin Kalfatovic.

BHL’s Trish Rose-Sandler admiring the frescoes on the walls of the first courtyard of Palazzo Vecchio, designed in 1453 by Michelozzo

Nevertheless, for me, the most prominent and distinctive characteristic of this TDWG Meeting, besides the delightful scenery outside, was probably the Meta-Workshop of current advances and concrete proposals in the Semantics for Biodiversity.  The many colleagues involved put together a very informative set of talks, even considering those newbies to the topic, opening with an introductory video and a Primer Session, followed up by presentations on Technologies, Formal Models and Interoperability with Semantics from the Genomic and Environmental fields. It will be really exciting to see how much all these projects will have advanced by our meeting next year in Kenya!  One in particular that I would like to note is the advancement of EOL’s Traitbank, which is opening doors to many possibilities for determining what we might be looking at in TDWG, EOL & BHL during the next years!

If you missed any of the presentations or want a complete panorama of the Semantics for Biodiversity, just take your time to go through the presentations available at the TDWG site.

And last, but not least, we were very pleased, as always, to share at TDWG with our scientific and technical colleagues who support BHL in so many ways.  We met several of those friends from institutions and projects BHL has collaborated with this year, such as: BioStor, Zoobank, Kew Gardens, IPNI, Index Fungorum, Plazi,  Karlsruhe Institute of Technology,  Pensoft, Vibrant, EOL, GBIF France, Canadensys and many others that I should include here and whose technical contributions keep making BHL what it is.

To all of you: Ci vediamo l’anno prossimo in Kenya!

BHL is a collaborative endeavor, no doubt about it; and it’s been thanks to these collaborations that we have the technical achievements we have. For many reasons, this is a good time to be thankful.

So as the BHL Technical Director, I would like to start by thanking my colleagues at the BHL Technical Group here in Missouri Botanical Garden (MBG) for taking the leading role in many of the pressing issues we’ve faced this year: our BHL Data Analyst and P.I. of the NEH-funded Art of Life project, Trish Rose-Sandler and our developer, Mike Lichtenberg, who’s been responsible for many of the new things you’ve seen in BHL and is always improving our Portal (check his Developer’s blog).

I’d also like to thank all the staff at the IT Division at MBG who have support our infrastructure this year and have been key to support our technical developments and enable the implementation of the required functionality; special thanks to Mike Westmoreland for supporting our installation of Macaw, our RefBank node at MBG, and our Solr infrastructure.

Thanks to our Technical Advisory Group (TAG) members who have supported our technical work all this past year by providing advice and leading several important tasks for the BHL community that started or concluded this year like Macaw (Joel Richards from Smithsonian), our Solr implementation for Full-text Search (Frances Webb from Cornell), the Partner Meta App implementation (Joe deVeer from Harvard) and represent BHL in technical meetings and hackathons (John Mignault from New York Botanical Garden, NYBG).  Our thanks also go to our folks at MBL, particularly to Anthony Goddard for the Cluster implementation and support throughout this past year.

Wild Turkey, male & female Taken from: Wilson et al. American ornithology; or, The natural history of the birds of the United States.v.3 pl.9 http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/41423917

Particular thanks to the Secretariat and colleagues at Smithsonian, for leading and supporting BHL’s technical and operational activities.  Our gratitude also goes to the BHL Executive Committee, the BHL Members Committee, the BHL Collections Committee (lead by our Collections Manager, Bianca Crowley) and the BHL Staff group, comprised of dedicated individuals from each of the BHL Member and Affiliate Libraries, who contribute countless hours to scanning, paginating and cataloging to make the millions of pages in BHL available for free and open access.  Each of these groups also actively further our common objective by providing guidance, perspective and recommendations on technical topics.

This year, we also had some significant staff turn around.  This is no surprise as, unfortunately, it is part of any extensive collaborative endeavor such as BHL. Without taking any merit from all of our other former colleagues, we want to thank Grace Costantino and Gilbert Borrego for their enormous contributions to BHL: much of our current technical work wouldn’t be what it is without their lasting contributions.

We also would like to thank our partners at the NEH-funded Art of Life project, Indianapolis Museum of Arts, University of Colorado, Marine Biological Laboratory and a special mention to the Internet Archive technical team.  Our thanks go to our BHL partners, particularly to Harvard, Cornell and New York Botanical Garden colleagues in our IMLS-funded project to use Purposeful Gaming to help improve OCR text in BHL, starting next month.

Finally, we are particularly thankful to those we worked directly with, whom, I’m sure, represent a wider collaboration by themselves: Rod Page for BioStor, Rich Pyle and Rob Whitton for Zoobank, Nicky Nicholson from IPNI and Paul Kirk for Index Fungorum, Donat Agosti and Terry Catapano at Plazi,  Guido Sautter at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology,  Lyubomir Penev, Jordan Biserkov and Theodore Georgiev at Pensoft and Dave Roberts for Vibrant and Dauvit King for Open University, the whole EOL team, particularly Jen Hammock, Cyndy Parr, Katja Schulz, Patrick Leary, Erick Mata and Bob Corrigan, Dmitry Mozzherin, David Shorthouse, and many, many others whose technical contributions keep making BHL what it is.

Our appreciation travels far to all our colleagues in BHL for their daily contributions, and translates into different languages for our international Global BHL Nodes collaborators for their invaluable support: Obrigado, Dankie, Danke, Dank, Gracias, Merci, Děkuji, 謝謝, شكرا

And most of all, our deepest thanks to all of the users of BHL who continuously inspire and challenge us to make BHL the best it can possibly be!

Thank you!

BHL image files are hosted by the Internet Archive (IA). The IA will be upgrading their power 16-17 April 2013. This will result in planned outages to the system. These outages will affect BHL’s ability to serve page images, generate PDFs, and downloads of certain file types.

Searching and browsing BHL metadata will not be affected by this outage.

Please be aware that in addition to the planned outages listed below, there may be residual and temporary outages around planned downtime.

Scheduled downtimes:

• 16 April 2013: 14:00 – 19:00 UTC
• 17 April 2013 22:00 – 02:00 UTC

In the event of any additional major outages, please monitor this site for more information.

Sorry for the inconvenience that this will cause our BHL users, but in the end this will provide better service.

From the Internet Archive blog:

Brace yourselves, outages are coming

This week, we are doubling the power coming into our primary data center so that we can archive and serve even more web pages, books, music and moving images. During those upgrades, there will be times when many of our web sites and services will not be available. Details below.

To keep the data safe, we will proactively shut down most of our services served from our primary data center. archive.org, openlibrary.org, iafcu.org and our blogs will be unavailable during the outages. The upgrades will happen over a two day period. We anticipate two prolonged outages, the first one from about 7am to 12noon PDT (14:00-19:00 UTC) on Tuesday, April 16. And the another one from 3pm to 7pm PDT (22:00-02:00 UTC) on Wednesday, April 17. Work might require additional outages between those two major ones.

During the outages, we’ll post updates to our @internetarchive twitter feed. Sorry for the inconvenience.

New updates have been released for the BHL API, plus new documentation about data exports and other services are now available on the Developer Tools and API section of the BHL wiki.

The BHL Application Programming Interface (API) is a set of web services that can be invoked via HTTP queries (GET/POST requests) or SOAP. Responses can be received in one of three formats: JSON, XML, or XML wrapped in a SOAP envelope.

Version 1 (formerly the BHL Name Services): Updated documentation for the first version of the API can be found at http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/api/docs/docs.html. This version of the API is provided solely to maintain backwards compatibility.

Version 2: The documentation for the latest version of the API can be found at http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/api2/docs/docs.html. The first version of the API was limited to data related to scientific names found in the BHL collection; version 2 adds access to title, author, volume, and page information. Please note that users are required to obtain an API Key from http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/getapikey.aspx in order to use version 2 of the API. This is the preferred version of the API.

View the API Privacy Policy and Terms Of Use.

Following user requests, the BHL exports now include Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and metadata for all pages in the BHL collection.

The updated documentation, including URLs to files and database schema, is available at:
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/data/BHLExportSchema.pdf

For a more lengthy description of motivation for these exports and plans for future services, please read Export of titles & scientific names in BHL now available for download.