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iPhylo

Rants, raves (and occasionally considered opinions) on phyloinformatics, taxonomy, and biodiversity informatics. For more ranty and less considered opinions, see my Twitter feed.ISSN 2051-8188. Written content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
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Published

Given that Wikipedia, Wikidata, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) all share the goal of making information free, open, and accessible, there seems to be a lot of potential for useful collaboration. Below I sketch out some ideas. BHL as a source of references for Wikipedia Wikipedia likes to have sources cited to support claims in its articles. BHL has a lot of articles that could be cited by Wikipedia articles.

Published

As part of BHL's "Celebrating 10 years of inspiring discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge" at the NHM and Kew Gardens in London, I was interviewed by Martin Kalfatovic (@UDCMRK). We chatted about BHL, the work I've been doing on BioStor, and the future of BHL.

Published

On Friday I discovered that BHL has started issuing CrossRef DOIs for articles, starting with the journal Revue Suisse de Zoologie . The metadata for these articles comes from BioStor. After a WTF and WWIC moment, I tweeted about this, and something of a Twitter storm (and email storm) ensued: To be clear, I'm very happy that BHL is finally assigning article-level DOIs, and that it is doing this via CrossRef.

Published

One of the limitations of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is that, unlike say Google Books, its search functions are limited to searching metadata (e.g., book and article titles) and taxonomic names. It doesn't support full-text search, by which I mean you can't just type in the name of a locality, specimen code, or a phrase and expect to get back much in the way of results.

Published

One of my guilty pleasures on a Sunday morning is browsing new content on the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). Indeed, so addicted am I to this that I have an IFTTT.com feed set to forward the BHL RSS feed to my iPhone (via the Pushover app. So, when I wake most Sunday mornings I have a red badge on Pushover announcing fresh BHL content for me to browse, and potentially add to BioStor.

Published

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) has recently introduced a feature that I strongly dislike. The post describing this feature (Inspiring discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge... states: What this means is that, whereas in the past a search in BHL would only turn up content actually in BHL, now that search may return results from other sources. What's not to like?