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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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Last month EOL took the brave step of including Wikipedia content in its pages. I say "brave" because early on EOL was pretty reluctant to embrace Wikipedia on this scale (see the report of the Informatics Advisory Group that I chaired back in 2008), and also because not all of EOL's curators have been thrilled with this development.

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Jim Croft drew my attention to a cool crowd-sourcing project to convert scans of Australia's newspapers to text. The site has a nice chart showing the projects' coverage of the Australian newspapers, which motivated me to show something similar for BioStor. Each journal page now shows a chart of article coverage.

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My BioStor project has reached over 13,000 articles, making it a sizeable respository of open access articles on biodiversity. It's still a tiny fraction of what could be extracted from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), but perhaps it's worth taking stock of what's there. Coverage One pleasing discovery is that, despite the 1923 cut-off due to U.S. copyright, BHL contains a lot of post-1923 articles.

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One of the more glaring limitations of my BHL viewer described in the previous post is that it can take a while to load all the page thumbnails (there can be hundreds). Given that one of the original motivations for this project was a faster viewer, this kinda sucks. What I'd like to do is load the thumbnails only when I need them, rather than all at once at the start -- in other words I'd like to implement lazy loading.

Published

Continuing with my exploration of the Biodiversity Heritage Library one obstacle to linking BHL content with nomenclature databases is the lack of a consistent way to refer to the same bibliographic item (e.g., book or journal). For example, the Amphibia Species of the World (ASW) page for Gastrotheca aureomaculata gives the first reference for this name as: Gastrotheca aureomaculata Cochran and Goin, 1970, Bull. U.S. Natl.