biodiversity heritage library

Chris FreelandBiodiversity Heritage Library

Biodiversity Heritage Librarywww.biodiversitylibrary.org

Chris FreelandDirector of Bioinformatics, Missouri Botanical Garden

Technical Director, Biodiversity Heritage Library

[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]


Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL)

In any well-appointed Natural History Library there should be found every book and every edition of every book dealing in the remotest way with the subjects concerned. One never knows wherein one edition differs from or supplements the other and unless these are on the same table at the same time it is not possible to collate them properly. Moreover for accurate work it is necessary for the student to verify every reference he may find; it is not enough to copy from a previous author; he must verify each reference itself from the original.

Charles Davies Sherborn, Epilogue to Index Animalium, March 1922

Charles Davies Sherborn (1861-1942)


The cited half-life of publications in taxonomy is longer than in any other scientific discipline

* * * The decay rate is longer than in any scientific discipline

- Macro-economic case for open access, Tom Moritz

Levinus Vincent

Elenchus tabularum, pinacothecarum, 1719

Biodiversity Heritage Library


BHL Partners

Museums

– American Museum of Natural History (New York)

– Natural History Museum (London)

– Smithsonian Institution (Washington)

– The Field Museum (Chicago)

Botanical Gardens

– Missouri Botanical Garden

– New York Botanical Garden

– Royal Botanic Garden, Kew

University Libraries

– Botany Libraries, Harvard University

– Ernst Meyer Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University

– University of Illinois Bioinformatics Institutes

– MBL/WHOI

– uBio.org


BHL Tech Partner: Internet Archive

Scanning on Scribes

Storage in Petaboxes


Botanicus & BHL


BHL Portal Features

• Ingest from IA using OAI


JPEG2000 (*.jp2) display

• RAW or TIF original => 85% .jp2

• LuraTech encoder

– Wavelet compression

• LizardTech decoder

– Tiled on the fly, cached for performance

• GSIV browser-based client viewer

– ‘AJAXian’


Parsed Subject Headings/Tag Cloud

Subject Heading from library catalog

Expressed as MARCXML

Tag Cloud


Google Maps API

TIF Image from ScannerConverted to text via PrimeOCRName finding via TaxonFinder Extract namesSubmit to NameBankSOAP response

Name Finding in action

with Taxonomic Intelligence…


Discovered Bibliography Interfacehttp://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/name/Epidendrum_liliastrum


BHL Name Serviceshttp://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/services/name/NameService.asmx


Coming soon…


Citation Resolution

• Open URL

via OpenURL


Migration to Fedora platform


Evaluation of Name Finding


Current Architecture

Internet ArchiveWeb access

BHL Portal & Taxonomic Intelligence


Future Architecture

BHL Portal & Taxonomic Intelligence

Internet Archive

Node

European Digital Library

French national node

Chinese national node

Multiple language interfaces

Multiple language interfaces Node

Node

Fedora objects


URLs

• BHL Portal– www.biodiversitylibrary.org

• BHL Discovered Bibliography example– www.biodiversitylibrary.org/name/Epidendrum_liliastrum

• BHL Name Services– www.biodiversitylibrary.org/services/name/NameService.asmx


Thank You!

Chris FreelandDirector of Bioinformatics, Missouri Botanical Garden

Technical Director, Biodiversity Heritage Library

[email protected]

biodiversity heritage library

Education

liliastrum bhl

botanicus bhl

bhl portal features

urls bhl portal

library catalog

bhl tech partner

museum of comparative

open access