Yesterday I posted notes on Web Hooks and OpenURL. That post was written when I was already late (you know, when you say to yourself "yeah, I've got time, it'll just take 5 minutes to finish this..."). The Web Hooks + OpenURL project is still very much a work in progress, but I thought a screen cast would help explain why I think this is going to make my life a lot easier.

One year ago I released BioStor, which scratched my itch regarding finding articles in the Biodiversity Heritage Library. This anniversary seems to be a good time to think about where next with this project, but also to ask whether it's been successful.

Continuing my hobby horse of linking taxonomic databases to digitised literature, I've been working for the last couple of weeks on linking names in the Australian Faunal Directory (AFD) to articles in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). AFD is a list of all animals known to occur in Australia, and it provides much of the data for the recently released Atlas of Living Australia.

One issue I'm running into with Mendeley is that it can create spurious documents, mangling my references in the process. This appears to be due to some over-zealous attempts to de-duplicate documents.

One of my hobby horses is the disservice taxonomic databases do their users by not linking to original scientific literature.

When I first launched BioStor (an article finding tool built on the top of the (Biodiversity heritage Library) I wanted people to be able to edit metadata and add references, but also minimise the chances that junk would get added. As a quick and dirty deterrent I used reCAPTCHA, so anybody adding a reference or editing the metadata had to pass a CAPTHCA before their edits were accepted.

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.

Every so often I revisit the idea of browsing a collection of documents (or specimens, or phylogenies) geographically. It's one thing to display a map of localities for single document (as I did most recently for Zootaxa ), it's quite another to browse a large collection.

In an earlier post I discussed linking NCBI taxonomy to Wikipedia. One way to tackle this is to add NCBI Taxonomy ID to Wikipedia pages. I reopened the case for adding the Taxonomy IDs to the Taxobox on each taxon page, but this met with substantial resistance.