Recently I've been thinking about the best ways to make article-level metadata from BioStor more widely available. For example, for someone visiting the BHL site there is no easy way to find articles, which are the basic unit for much of the scientific literature. How hard would it be to add articles to BHL?

Following on from my previous post on BHL apps and a Twitter discussion in which I appealed for a "sexier" interface for BHL (to which @elywreplied that is what BHL Australia were trying to do), here are some further thoughts on improving BHL's web interface. Build a new interface A fun project would be to create a BHL website clone using just the BHL API.

Since I won't be able to be at the Biodiversity Heritage Library's Life and Literature meeting I thought I'd share some ideas for their Life and Literature Code Challenge. The deadline is pretty close (October 17) so having ideas now isn't terribly helpful I admit. That aside, here are some thoughts inspired by the challenge.

Quick post on a little tool I came across, moz-hocr-edit. This Firefox add-on lets you proofread Optical Character Recognition (OCR) output. Given my interest in OCR and the Biodiversity Heritage Library I decided to take it for a spin.

Last December I released a web site called Australian Faunal Directory on CouchDB, which was part of my ongoing exploration of how to build a simple yet useful database of taxonomic names. In particular, I want to link names directly to the primary taxonomic literature.

One of the many biggest challenges I've faced with the BioStor project, apart from dealing with messy metadata, has been handling page images. At present I get these from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. They are big (typically 1 Mb in size), and have the caramel colour of old paper. Nothing fills up a server quicker than thousands of images.

Back in 2006 in a short post entitled "Building the encyclopedia of life" I wrote that GenBank is a potentially rich source of information on host-parasite relationships.

Following on from my previous post on microcitations I've blasted all the citations in Nomenclator Zoologicus through my microcitation service and created a simple web site where these results can be browsed.

One of the challenges of linking databases of taxonomic names to the primary literature is the minimal citation style used by nomenclators (see my earlier post Nomenclators + digitised literature = fail). For example, consider Nomenclator Zoologicus.

BioStor has had a Twitter account @biostor_org for a while, but it's not been active. I finally got around to hooking it up to BioStor, so that now every time an article is added to BioStor, the title of that article and it's URL appears in the @biostor_org Twitter feed. Activity on this feed will be variable, depending on whether articles are being added manually, or in bulk.