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?

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.

Following on from the previous post, I wrote a simpe Mediawiki extension to insert a Google Book into a wiki page. Written in a few minutes, not tested much, etc. To use this, copy the code below and save in a file googlebook.php in the extensions directory of your Mediawiki installation.

I've started to come across more taxonomic books in Google Books, such as Catalogue of the specimens of snakes in the collection of the British museum by John Edward Gray. Google books provides a nice widget for embedding views of books. There is tool for generating the Javascript code. Note that in Blogger (which I use to create this blog) you need to make sure that theJavascript occurs on a single line with no line breaks for it to work.