Biodiversity Heritage Library: Finding Agriculture among Biodiversity: Metadata in Practice

abernard102@gmail.com 2015-01-22

Summary:

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is committed to providing free and open access to over 500 years of natural history literature from across the globe. Towards that goal, the Library currently contains over 45 million pages of biodiversity content, representing over 155,000 volumes and 90,000 titles. However, hosting the content online is just part of our vision to 'inspire discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge.' Users must be able to identify content relevant to their work and interest from amongst this vast corpus. For this, metadata is all-important. Metadata is 'data that describes other data.' BHL's metadata describes the digital resources in our collection, providing not only author, title, volume, publication year and place, and article information, but also keywords describing the topics discussed within each book. Eventually, full-text searching will also allow users to search across the actual text within a book to discover items relevant to their search parameters.  Dr. Jane Bromley knows the importance of metadata all too well. It is a critical component of her daily work.  Bromley is a research fellow at The Open University, where she has worked since 2012 as part of a subgroup of the Natural Language Processing group. Under the EU FP7 funded agINFRAproject, which aims to promote data sharing in agricultural sciences, Bromley's subgroup studies information extraction from legacy biodiversity literature. Specifically, they are seeking to enhance an existing specialist agricultural resource, AGRIS.  AGRIS is a collaborative network of more than 150 institutions providing free access to agricultural information in the form of more than 7 million bibliographic references on agricultural research and technology. This multilingual bibliographic database also contains links to related data resources on the Web.  BHL contains a vast amount of agricultural information. Searching the subject 'agriculture' alone produces over 2,100 books and journals in BHL. Recognizing the potential of these resources, Bromley and her colleagues, including Dr. David King and Dr. David Morse, developed a process to enhance AGRIS with BHL content. They relied on BHL's metadata to do this ..."

Link:

http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2015/01/finding-agriculture-among-biodiversity.html

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.data oa.agriculture oa.biodiversity oa.bhl oa.agris oa.libraries oa.librarians oa.search oa.metadata

Date tagged:

01/22/2015, 10:12

Date published:

01/22/2015, 05:12