University of Glasgow

Roderic Page

When I think of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) or GBIF I tend
to think of taxonomy and biodiversity. Folk wisdom has it that BHL is
full of old books, mostly pre-1923. Great for finding old taxonomic
names, or [nice
artwork](http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2012/03/bhl-funded-by-neh-to-reveal-art-of-life.html),
but not exactly \"modern\" biology. GBIF is mainly about displaying
organism distributions based on museum specimens, the primary data of
taxonomic research. Again, great stuff, but aren\'t museums simply full
of dead stuff that people have collected and forgotten about?  
  
But BHL has a lot more post-1923 content than I suspect most people
realise (several museum or society journals have 21st century issues in
BHL\'s archives, for example). Continuing the theme of [linking BHL and
GBIF](http://iphylo.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/linking-gbif-and-biodiversity-heritage.html)
content, as part of a forthcoming project on taxonomic names (to be made
available \"real soon now\") I stumbled across this 1976 paper in BHL
(now in BioStor):  
  
[Monograph on \"Lithoglyphopsis\" aperta, the snail host of Mekong River
Schistosomiasis](http://biostor.org/reference/102054) by Davis *et
al.*.  
  
![Malacologia157576inst
0263](http://lh5.ggpht.com/-jZvJmXGivkg/T3HHVwu4ZkI/AAAAAAAABLs/AAgc7soVuWo/malacologia157576inst_0263.jpg?imgmax=800 "malacologia157576inst_0263.jpg"){style="display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;"
border="0" width="383" height="600"}  
  
This paper has been indexed in PubMed
([PMID:948206](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/948206), but as far as
I\'m aware, BHL (and BioStor) has the only digital copy of this paper.
(As a side note, wouldn\'t it be great if PubMed could link to BHL
content?).  
  
The article page in BioStor shows a map derived from the OCR text,
showing a two localities:  
  
![Mekong](http://lh3.ggpht.com/-lVM1hQsTTrI/T3HHXZPMHoI/AAAAAAAABL0/2kAchrGffdE/mekong.png?imgmax=800 "mekong.png"){style="display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;"
border="0" width="400" height="207"}  
  
Below the map are the specimen codes I\'ve automatically extracted from
the OCR text, linked to the corresponding records in GBIF, which are
georeferenced (e.g., [ANSP Malacology
330925](http://data.gbif.org/occurrences/215921962/)).  
  
If we joined these things up just a little more, we could do some useful
things. For example, what if a researcher searching in PubMed for
schistosomiasis in South East Asia could find the Davis *et al.* paper,
and then go to BHL or BioStor to read it? What if a researcher looking
at gastropod distributions in the Mekong River in the GBIF portal could
see that BHL had publications on diseases associated with these
organisms (as well as their taxonomy and biology). We could also
traverse the link from GBIF to BHL to PubMed and provide a direct route
from distribution maps to biomedical literature.  
  
It seems there\'s scope for trying to connect BHL, GBIF, and PubMed, and
that BHL and GBIF may have important roles to play in providing access
to basic information about organisms that have a serious impact on human
populations.


When I think of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) or GBIF I tend to think of taxonomy and biodiversity. Folk wisdom has it that BHL is full of old books, mostly pre-1923. Great for finding old taxonomic names, or nice artwork, but not exactly "modern" biology. GBIF is mainly about displaying organism distributions based on museum specimens, the primary data of taxonomic research.

Messages de Rogue Scholar

BHL and GBIF as biomedical databases