“It seems like we are on an anniversary splurge. In April, I marked my 10th year as BHL Program Director. Today is a more important date in BHL history. May 9, 2007 marked the official launch of BHL content on the web. We celebrated that day with one of our first BHL blog posts (Biodiversity Heritage Library and Encyclopedia of Life Launch!). On that launch date, BHL had 306 titles, 3,236 volumes, and 1,271,664 pages of taxonomic literature. Today, BHL has grown to become a global consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries and hosts over 60 million pages and more than 281,000 volumes….”
Category Archives: oa.bhl
Library as Laboratory: Analyzing Biodiversity Literature at Scale
“Imagine the great library of life, the library that Charles Darwin said was necessary for the “cultivation of natural science” (1847). And imagine that this library is not just hundreds of thousands of books printed from 1500 to the present, but also the data contained in those books that represents all that we know about life on our planet. That library is the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) The Internet Archive has provided an invaluable platform for the BHL to liberate taxonomic names, species descriptions, habitat description and much more. Connecting and harnessing the disparate data from over five-centuries is now BHL’s grand challenge. The unstructured textual data generated at the point of digitization holds immense untapped potential. Tim Berners-Lee provided the world with a semantic roadmap to address this global deluge of dark data and Wikidata is now executing on his vision. As we speak, BHL’s data is undergoing rapid transformation from legacy formats into linked open data, fulfilling the promise to evaporate data silos and foster bioliteracy for all humankind….”
Browse Auckland War Memorial Museum T?maki Paenga Hira – Biodiversity Heritage Library
Browse Auckland War Memorial Museum T?maki Paenga Hira – Biodiversity Heritage Library. You can explore over 10,000 page.
Biodiversity Heritage Library and Plazi: Biodiversity Literature Repository
“This document describes the cooperation and collaboration of BHL and Plazi, on common goals. It outlines common goals and areas of common interests, and clarifies key areas of responsibility. The digital arena allows building a large corpus of literature and from that a “graph” of knowledge or knowledge graph through identification, extraction and linking of data. It provides an emerging access platform to the knowledge beyond the conventional traditional human-reader focused access. It allows new modes of access, including text and data mining, search, visualization and the discovery of new findings based on the accessibility of data. This knowledge graph does not replace existing media, but rather complements them. In the case of biodiversity sciences, it is based on both the estimated 500 Million pages of biodiversity literature and on increasingly born-digital publications. In biodiversity, the very rich data centric publications with the highly sophisticated implicit citation networks are a perfect base to build such a knowledge graph. In order to build the knowledge graph, the data in the publications must be liberated and made open, findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable (FAIR) for machine use. This is the necessary additional step after the digitization of existing literature….”
What Is BHL’s New Persistent Identifier Working Group DOI’ng? – Biodiversity Heritage Library
“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)….
BHL has been retrospectively minting DOIs for historic publications since 2011, but the focus has primarily been on monographs. BHL’s new Persistent Identifier Working Group (PIWG) is (at least initially) focusing on journal articles. Minting DOIs for articles on BHL is a far more complex and time-consuming task than minting DOIs for monographs. This is because article DOIs need article data: every journal volume uploaded onto BHL must be accompanied by journal and volume data, but there is no requirement that contributors provide article data….
COVID-19 provided an unexpected opportunity to make a considerable dent in this work. With no access to scanners or library materials, a number of BHL contributors, including Harvard University Libraries, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle and BHL Australia, pivoted from making new content accessible to making their existing content on BHL more discoverable. For example, BHL Australia’s digitisation volunteers gathered, gap filled and checked article-level metadata for over 30,000 articles in 2020….”