Biodiversity Heritage Library: Inspiring discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge...

"On March 2013, with support from the National Science Foundation's Advance in Biological Informatics program and in collaboration with our Australian colleagues at Museum Victoria, BHL updated its website architecture to include the possibility of accessing and displaying article and chapter metadata.  Our APIs and Data Exports were also modified to include this available information.  The BHL book viewer was updated to allow users to view multiple columns of pages on screen at once and more easily navigate to a specific page within a book. Users can also view OCR text alongside page images, and, where the books have been indexed, users can navigate directly to the articles or chapters within using a Table of Contents feature.   The custom PDF creation process was also modified to allow users to select pages for their PDF while in the book-viewer mode and more easily review the PDF before creation. Also, other important biodiversity informatics initiatives like ZooBank and The International Plant Names Index (IPNI), are now linking directly and more closely to BHL journals and pages using BHL’s citation disambiguation service, based on the OpenURL standard. Now BHL is expanding the data model for its portal to be able to accommodate references to content in other well-known repositories. This is highly beneficial to end users as it allows them to search for articles, alongside books and journals, within a single search interface instead of having to search each of these siloes separately. BHL is strategic about the content providers it chooses to partner with and works with trusted organizations that provide relevant quality materials, technical know-how, resource support, and sustainability of content links. The improved BHL User Interface enables users to search among the 81,000 articles and chapters harvested and indexed from BioStor. So far, most of these articles have been identified from within BHL corpus of books and journals. But now, BHL has included metadata information provided by three well-known and trusted repositories of freely available biodiversity literature: Biblioteca Digital del Real Jardin Botanico (CSIC), Pensoft Publishers and the SciELO Network ... Note that, although freely and openly available, an important difference of this type of content from trusted repositories is that the text shown is not being hosted at the BHL's Internet Archive collection, like the rest of the BHL corpus, but rather on their respective external repositories.  This means that, even when BHL still allows discovery and access to the full-text from its Portal, and that BHL will benefit from all new additions and corrections to the content, we are not able to provide the exact same services of taxa name finding and showing the content in our own book viewer... just yet!  But to help clarify any confusion, our User Interface and RSS Feeds clearly indicate whenever you will be leaving our site to open a new window and access the external content from our partners. Take a look at some of the examples that Pensoft: (biodiversitylibrary.org/part/98901), Real Jardín Botánico (biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/74811) and the SciELO Network (biodiversitylibrary.org/part/107970) have provided us with and tell us here, through the feedback form, what you think about this new way to discover and access more biodiversity content through the Biodiversity Heritage Library Portal."