After some fussing and hair pulling I've constructed a demo of linking a journal to the Biodiversity Heritage Library and displaying the results in Zotero (see my earlier post for rationale). After some searching I managed to retrieve metadata for several hundred article from the Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature . Using a local copy of the BHL metadata, I wrote a script that looked up each article in BHL and found the URL of the

One thing I find myself doing (probably more often than I should) is adding a reference to my Zotero library for an item in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). BHL doesn't have article-level metadata (see But where are the articles?), so when I discover a page of interest (e.g., one that contains the original description of a taxon) I store metadata for the article containing that page in my Zotero library.

Time for a quick and dirty Friday afternoon hack. Based on responses to the BHL timeline I released two days ago, I've created a version that can compare the history of two names using sparklines (created using Google's Chart API). I use sparklines to give a quick summary of hits over time (grouped by decade). The demo is here. It's crude (minimal error checking, no progress bars while it talks to BHL), but it's home time.

One thing about the Encyclopedia of Life which bugs me no end is the awful way it displays the bibliography generated from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). The image on the right shows the bibliography for the frog Hyla rivularis Taylor, 1952. It's one long, alphabetical list of pages. How can a user make sense of this?

I've been playing recently with the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), and am starting to get a sense for the complexities (and limitations) of the metadata BHL stores about publications. The more I look at BHL the more I think the resource is (a) wonderfully useful and (b) hampered by some dodgy metadata.

Vince Smith has produced a nice flyer for my forthcoming talk at The Natural History Museum on March 17th (11-12). It will be a busy day as I'm also talking at the British Library in the evening (6pm - 8:30pm), for which Sarah Kemmitt has produced a flyer, and set up a discussion forum on Nature Network. With all this effort going into the artwork, I'd better actually come up with something useful to say.

Stumbled across Project Xanadu, Ted Nelson's vision of the way the web should be (e.g., BACK TO THE FUTURE: Hypertext the Way It Used To Be). Nelson coined the term "transclusion", including one document in side another by reference.

In a series of emails Chris Freeland, David Shorthouse, and I have been discussing DOIs in the context of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). I thought it worthwhile to capture some thoughts here. In an email Chris wrote: I think the perception that there are two "camps" is unfortunate.

Added the Biodiversity Heritage Library blog to my links on my blog, then noticed that BHL have disabled comments. So, we can view their progress, but can't leave comments. Sigh, I wonder whether BHL has quite grasped that one of the best uses of a blog is to interact with the people who leave comments, in other words, have a conversation.