The Biodiversity Heritage Library: Advancing Metadata Practices in a Collaborative Digital Library

Pilsk, Suzanne C.; Person, Matthew A.; deVeer, Joseph; Furfey, John F.; Kalfatovic, Martin R.

doi:10.1080/19386389.2010.506400

Cited by 13 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Negligible time is required to determine the origin of many scientific names unattributed in modern scholarly works. With the digitization of historic texts in online databases (i.e., Biodiversity Heritage Library), we are linked more easily today to our academic predecessors than any other time in the recent past ( Pilsk et al 2010 ). Correcting the attribution of the word Ameiva honors scientific inquiry of the past and historic contributions of indigenous people to Western scientific nomenclature.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On ‘lost’ indigenous etymological origins with the specific case of the name Ameiva

Angeli

2018

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Modern biology builds upon the historic exploration of the natural world. Recognizing the origin of a species’ name is one path to honor the historic exploration and description of the natural world and the indigenous peoples that lived closely with organisms prior to their description. While digitization of historic papers catalogued in databases such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) allows for searching of the first use and origin of names, the rapid pace of taxonomic publishing can occlude a thorough search for etymologies. The etymological origin of the genus name Ameiva is one such case; while unattributed in multiple recent works, it is of Tupí language origin. The first description was in the Historiae Rerum Naturalium Brasiliae by George Marcgrave (1648). Ameiva was the name used by Marcgrave’s Amerindian hosts in 17th century Dutch Brazil, where local people spoke the now extinct language Tupí. The Tupí origin was not lost, however, until as recently as the 2000s. Herein, the pre- and post-Linnaean use of the name Ameiva is traced and when the name is attributed to the Tupí language and to Marcgrave through time it is noted. The opportunity to discover and/or recover etymological origins, especially names from extinct and indigenous languages, provides insight into the early Western sciences. Careful study of etymology by naturalists is consistent with the idea that science is an evolving process with many predecessors to appreciate.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On ‘lost’ indigenous etymological origins with the specific case of the name Ameiva

Angeli

2018

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“…Previous writings about BHL's metadata [9] do not discuss its utility. Instead, they consider only the practical problems of assigning metadata to BHL con-tent, given the need to maintain a high throughput in the digitization process, and handling the vagaries of historic biodiversity literature such as separate foldout pages.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Finding Agriculture among Biodiversity: Metadata in Practice

Bromley

King

Morse

2014

Communications in Computer and Information Science

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Abstract. The breadth of biodiversity literature available through the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is potentially of great use to agricultural research. It provides access to literature drawn from across the world, and its archives document the Earth as it was one hundred years ago and more. However, this strength of BHL is also its weakness: the breadth of coverage of BHL can complicate finding relevant literature. In this short paper, we will explore the practical issues arising from attempting to filter out relevant legacy literature to support agricultural research.Keywords: agriculture, biodiversity, metadata, AGRIS, AGROVOC, agrotags, KEA, BHL, LCSH, search, keywords, subjects, classification, information retrieval IntroductionThe work described in this paper comes from the EU FP7 funded agINFRA project [1], which aims to promote data sharing in agricultural sciences. We are seeking to enhance an existing specialist agricultural resource, AGRIS [2], with content from a more comprehensive -but general -resource, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) [3], without introducing too many items that are irrelevant to agriculture. In doing this we are not attempting to develop new filtering algorithms. Rather our core task is to create a simple workflow to harvest and filter relevant content from BHL to make it accessible through AGRIS. We describe how we use AGROVOC [4], a specialist agricultural controlled vocabulary, to assist in accurate filtering of BHL content, and how these vocabulary terms both help and hinder that process. The issues that we are addressing throughout this paper are "what is a suitable list of terms to use to filter?" and "what should we filter on -provided metadata such as the title, classification and subject, or the whole text?"A brief overview of the relevant repositories and workflows follows. AGRIS.The UN Food and Agriculture Organization's AGRIS (International Information System for Agricultural science and technology) is a mainstay of agriculture research. AGRIS began in 1976 as a bibliographic reference library to which all interested researchers could contribute, promoting access to agricultural information. It now has more than seven million references, and links to relevant data resources on the web. AGROVOC.To complement AGRIS, FAO developed AGROVOC, a controlled vocabulary to be "used by researchers, librarians and information managers for indexing, retrieving and organizing data in agricultural information systems and web pages". The consistency provided by using a specific set of defined terms to access agricultural information, including AGRIS, assists productive use of that information. Applying AGROVOC terms to filtered BHL content exposed through AGRIS brings the benefits of discoverability through linked open data to that content.

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“…The latter is being aggregated by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF; ) to provide an overview of the spatial distribution of life on Earth. Much of the biological literature is similarly being converted from physical to digital form, most notably by the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL; ) (Pilsk et al, 2010). Taxonomic publication is becoming increasingly digital through rise of “mega” journals such as Zootaxa () (Zhang, 2006), and semantically enriched journals such as ZooKeys () (Penev et al, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

BioNames: linking taxonomy, texts, and trees

Page

2013

PeerJ

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BioNames is a web database of taxonomic names for animals, linked to the primary literature and, wherever possible, to phylogenetic trees. It aims to provide a taxonomic “dashboard” where at a glance we can see a summary of the taxonomic and phylogenetic information we have for a given taxon and hence provide a quick answer to the basic question “what is this taxon?” BioNames combines classifications from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and GenBank, images from the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), animal names from the Index of Organism Names (ION), and bibliographic data from multiple sources including the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and CrossRef. The user interface includes display of full text articles, interactive timelines of taxonomic publications, and zoomable phylogenies. It is available at .

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library: Advancing Metadata Practices in a Collaborative Digital Library

Cited by 13 publications

References 2 publications

On ‘lost’ indigenous etymological origins with the specific case of the name Ameiva

On ‘lost’ indigenous etymological origins with the specific case of the name Ameiva

Finding Agriculture among Biodiversity: Metadata in Practice

BioNames: linking taxonomy, texts, and trees

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