iPhylo: Exploring images in the Biodiversity Literature Repository

"The Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR) is a repository of taxonomic papers hosted by Zenodo. Where possible Plazi have extracted individual images and added those to the BLR, even if the article itself is not open access. The justification for being able to do this is presented here: DOI:10.1101/087015. I'm not entirely convinced by their argument (see Copyright and the Use of Images as Biodiversity Data) but rather than rehash that argument I decide dit would be much more fun to get a sense of what is in the BLR. I built a tool to scrape data from Zenodo and store it in CouchDB, put a simple search engine on top (using the search functionality in Cloudant) to search within the figure captions, and wrote some code to use a cloud-based image server to generate thumbnails for the images in Zenodo (some of which are quite big). The tool is hosted at Heroku, you can try it out here: https://zenodo-blr-interface.herokuapp.com/."