All posts tagged with technical-notes

HTTPS? What does it mean? HTTP is the language that your browser uses to communicate to BHL and the S stands for Secure, encrypted, unreadable, or at least much, much harder to read.The web is moving to encrypted connections across the board. In 2014 Google announced that their page rank algorithm that decides the order of your google.com search results will now rank insecure pages slightly lower than secure pages. From security to rankings, encrypted connections are better for everyone.

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.

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.

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: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.

Nǐ hǎo! Last month, I attended the Annual Meeting of the Biodiversity Informatics Standards Organization (www.tdwg.org), one of my favorite meetings of the year because it provides a thorough view of the current advances in the field of Biodiversity Informatics. TDWG 2012 was hosted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China, on Oct. 22-27.

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.

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