Biodiversity Heritage Library for Boston Library Consortium

© 2008 Biodiversity Heritage Library www.biodiversitylibrary.org

BHL: Purposeful Technology

“We get to use emerging technology, not just play around with it.”

Chris Freeland

Technical Director, BHL

Director of Bioinformatics, Missouri Botanical Garden


Goals of BHL

• Unlock collections

• Connect scientists with literature

• Connect literature with users

• Connect users with other users

• Inspire


Ingest of Materials

• From Internet Archive– Custom process, documented on BHL portal

• From Botanicus– Precursor to BHL– MOBOT’s inhouse end-to-end digital library

application

• From Others– MARCXML– Folder of sequentially named files


Parsed Subject Headings/Tag Cloud

Subject Heading from library catalog

Expressed as MARCXML

Tag Cloud


Google Maps API

Raw Image Converted to text via OCRName finding via TaxonFinder Extract namesSubmit to NameBankSOAP response

Name Finding in action

with Taxonomic Intelligence…


JPEG2000 (*.jp2) display

• RAW or TIF original => 85% .jp2

• LuraTech or Kakadu encoder– Wavelet compression

• LizardTech decoder– Tiled on the fly, cached for

performance• GSIV browser-based client

viewer– ‘AJAXian’































Provider Integration

• Encyclopedia of Life

• Atrium Andes Biodiversity

• Wikipedia

• More to come…







Business

Biodiversity Heritage Library for Boston Library Consortium