Yesterday I uploaded a manuscript to Nature Precedings that describes the inner workings of BioStor.

@elyw I'd leave bookmarking to 3rd party, e.g. Mendeley. #bhlib specific issues incl.

Flipboard is a new application for the iPad that is pitching itself as a personalised social magazine. It's launch created a lot of buzz, so much so that many users were unable to add their Facebook and Twitter accounts to it, much to their chagrin. I was one of these annoyed users, but now that I've been able to login I've been having a play and it's a lot of fun.

The open access taxonomic journal ZooKeys has published a special issue with four papers, each available in HTML, PDF, and XML, the later being extensively marked up. Penev et al. ("Semantic tagging of and semantic enhancements to systematics papers: ZooKeys working examples", doi:10.3897/zookeys.50.538) describes the process involved in creating these XML files.

Cooliris is a web browser plugin that can display a large number of images as a moving "infinite" wall. It's Friday, so for fun I added a media RSS feed to BioStor to make the BHL page scans available to Cooliris.

Mendeley have called for proposals to use their forthcoming API. The API will publicly available soon, but in a clever move Mendeley will provide early access to developers with cool ideas.

The ability to create PDFs for the articles BioStor extracts from the Biodiversity Heritage Library has been the single most requested feature for BioStor. I've taken a while to get around to this -- for a bunch of reasons -- but I've finally added it today.

Chris Freeland tweeted about the presentation he gave to a recent BHL meeting, the slides for which are reproduced below: BHL Tech Report View more presentations from chrisfreeland. It makes interesting viewing.

It's Friday, so time for either a folly or a rant. BHL have put another user survey into the field http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BHLsurvey. I loathe user surveys.

A little while ago I came across Wikisource, and it dawned on me that this is a model for BHL. To quote from the Wikisource web site: Much of their content comes from the Internet Archive (as does BHL's), and Wikisource have developed extensions for Mediaiwki to do some cool things, such as extract text and images from DjVu files.