A while ago I posted BHL to PDF workflow which was a sketch of a work flow to generate clean, searchable PDFs from Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) content: I've made some progress on putting this together, as well as expanded the goal somewhat. In fact, there are several goals: BioStor articles need to be archived somewhere.

One reason I was able to build BioNames is because a significant fraction of the taxonomic literature for animals is now online, either due to the efforts of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, digital archives, commercial publishers, or individual institutions and scientific societies. However there are still big gaps in literature availability.

NESCent, EOL, and BHL have put together a research sprint: Since I won't be applying to participate I thought I'd sketch some possible ideas here. Co-occurrence of taxon names as proxy for ecological associations Some time ago I noted that if you build a "tag tree" for taxonomic names in a BHL document you can get some interesting patterns, such as the names of hosts and their parasites occurring together.

The new look Biodiversity Heritage Library includes articles extracted from BioStor, which is a step forwards in making the "legacy" biodiversity literature more accessible. But we still have some way to go. In particular the articles lack the obvious decoration of a modern article, the DOI.

The new look Biodiversity Heritage Library has just launched. It's a complete refresh of the old site, based on the Biodiversity Heritage Library–Australia site. If you want an overview of what's new, BHL have published a guide to the new look site. Congrats to involved in the relaunch. One of the new features draws on the work I've been doing on BioStor.

I've just come back from a pro-iBiosphere Workshop at Leiden where the role of "legacy literature" became the subject of some discussion.

tl;dr Readmill might be a great platform for shared annotation and correction of Biodiversity Heritage Library content. Thinking about accessing the taxonomic literature I started revisiting previous ideas.

Quick note that as much as I like that the Biodiversity Heritage Library is using DOIs, they are generating them for publications that already have them (or are acquiring them from other sources). For example, here are the two DOIs for the same article (formatted using the DOI Citation Formatter), one from BHL and one from the Smithsonian: The BHL DOI resolves to a page in BHL, the other DOI resolves to the a page in the Smithsonian Digital

Was going to post this as a comment on the BHL blog but they use Blogger's native comment system, which is horrible, and it refused to accept my comment (yes, yes, I'm sure it did that on grounds of taste). I read the recent post Building a BHL Africa and couldn't believe my eyes when I read the following: CDs! Really?

Just noticed that BioStor now has just over 70,000 articles extracted from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. This number is a little "soft" as there are some duplicates in the database that I need to clean out, but it's a nice sounding number. Each article has full text available, and in most cases reasonably complete metadata.