Ten major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions in the United Kingdom and the United States joined in 2005 to develop a strategy and operational plan to digitize the published literature of biodiversity held in their respective collections and to make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global 'biodiversity commons.' Headquartered at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is one of the cornerstones of the Encyclopedia of Life, a global effort to document all 1.8 million named species of animals, plants, and other forms of life on earth. This paper provides an overview of the BHL and its potential impact on biodiversity research, describes the BHL portal and its innovative search services, and provides a case study of the process from one of the members: the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University.
This joint statement aims at encouraging all authors, publishers and editors involved in scientific publishing to give the bibliographic source of the authorities of taxonomic names. This initiative, written by members of the three communities, has been approved by the executive boards of the SPNHC (Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections), CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities) and BHL (Biodiversity Heritage Library).
*Background/Question/Methods* The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL; "http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/":http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/), one of the cornerstones of the Encyclopedia of Life (eol.org), now contains nearly 13 million digitized pages of 12,000 titles comprised of 32,000 volumes of the published literature of biodiversity held in the collections of major natural history libraries. The BHL has made this literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global “biodiversity commons.” The BHL partnership is working with the global taxonomic community, publishers, organizations such as JSTOR and BIOONE, and the Internet Archive, to ensure that the biodiversity literature is available to all, from students to scientists with diverse interests.This poster will describe the BHL with particular focus on the taxonomic tools available and the development of international partnerships and expanded collaborations with scientists. BHL-Europe has now formed and participation by other countries and projects will augment the available literature and provide redundant repositories and mirror sites. New tools such as the PDF-generator, article repository, updated search interface and social networking tools will be reviewed. Results/Conclusions The BHL Portal is a transformative research environment for scientific inquiry. The tools and information in the BHL have accelerated research in life sciences. Users reach the BHL through a free, service-based portal formed by coupling existing databases with digitized, searchable images and OCR text. The array of tools for taxonomically intelligent services has expanded. These tools are designed to overcome the problem of common name versus scientific name and changes of names over time and provide easy access to the available literature on a particular organism. This scientific reference system for investigating literature offers a model that reflects, and also amplifies, scientists' use of the natural history literature. In 2008, name finding statistics showed that 30 million name string occurrences were extracted from the BHL with 4.4 million of these being unique. Of these, 23.7 million have been verified by NameBank. Enhancement of OCR tools or manual text correction is crucial to the further development of data mining. Social networking tools may be utilized to expand OCR text correction to users and for tagging maps and illustrations. Scientists are providing bibliographies for taxonomic groups that can be incorporated into the selection process. Organizations have offered already digitized articles for deposit to the BHL. Hence, an article repository has been developed together with tools to extract pages of text, from BHL content (PDF-generator).
We describe the analysis of zero result searches in DLESE, the Digital Library for Earth System Education, with the intent to use the information to discover gaps in the collection. Close examination of null result searches reveals insights into the kinds of information sought by users but which is missing from the collection. Although it is not possible to consistently isolate collection gaps as a cause for null result searches, it is possible to define a set of null result searches that are very likely to have been caused by collections gaps. This information can be used to improve a collection in specific subject areas. We recommend using this method, along with other inputs, for a digital library with a specific collection scope but a broad and mostly unknown user base, and we recognize the need for automating this analysis.
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