[Taxacom] Centrally supported electronic archive

Tue May 26 12:36:18 CDT 2009

Frank, et al,

Thanks for the mentions of Botanicus & BHL.  As has been mentioned through this list many times, the goal of the Biodiversity Heritage Library is to make all the public domain biodiversity literature available through an integrated portal, and to provide archival and preservation layers underneath for long-term, persistent storage & access.  A new venture, launched two weeks ago in Berlin, is the BHL-Europe, which will help organize the digitized materials that exist throughout natural history museums and botanical gardens in Europe, including the excellent repository mentioned from Madrid.

I agree with the plea to invest in existing infrastructure.  However, in the case of historic, out-of-print literature, the infrastructure had to be created, and again, that's what we're trying to provide with BHL.  PubMed is an excellent resource for contemporary literature, but as we all know the long history of taxonomy requires materials dating to the 1750's.  PubMed, to my knowledge and experience, won't help here. 

A major (valid) criticism of BHL is our lack of article-level access, and this has become our major area of development of late.  We are attacking this problem in multiple ways.  Following the lead & example of the BnF (Gallica) and Madrid, BHL has incorporated functionality that allows users to build their own PDFs. We also ask users that *if* they are building a PDF of an article to take a moment or two to enter the article title and authors; we then save those PDFs+metadata.  More information on this effort is available at the following posts on the BHL Blog:
Link to overview: http://bit.ly/vlGgc
Link to quick analysis of submitted data: http://bit.ly/4Jqu9

To serve these files, and to allow others within the community to contribute the multitude of files that invariably exist on every scholar's hard drive, BHL is building an article repository or a "CiteBank" (as envisionedpreviously in this thread) that will provide users the ability to log in, share bibliographies and citations, and upload files associated with a citation (PDF of an article, annotated XML version, etc.), including all the article content within the BHL digitized journals.

CiteBank will be made available for beta use & review next week.  BHL will be taking the information contributed and dropping it down into a preservation repository running the Fedora Commons software, and are in discussions with the new Fedora/DSpace collaboration called DuraSpace to store these data via cloud storage, among other distributed solutions.  

Over time, it would be great to view BHL's CiteBank as the centralized repository previously requested.  We're trying to make that happen.

Chris Freeland
Technical Director, BHL

-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu on behalf of Frank Farruggia
Sent: Mon 5/25/2009 9:51 PM
To: taxacom
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Centrally supported electronic archive

Dear Karen,

We do already have a few amazing publication databases started.  For example the few that I have been delving into lately are "Botanicus" (http://www.botanicus.org/), "The Biodiversity Heritage Library" (http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/About.aspx), and "Bibliotecha Digital del Real Jardin Botanico Madrid" (http://bibdigital.rjb.csic.es/spa/index.php).  These are amazing tools for older, hard to find literature, as well as some recent journals but if the infrastructure is there or could be easily enhanced these three sources could be linked and updated to include the more recent pubs as well as those journals which are principally electronic.  

The first two have a nice feature which identifies species names that are found in each page.  I have been inquiring about having a tool to search the publication for specific taxon names to help with the difficult to locate names.  

Just a thought.

Frank

Frank T. Farruggia 

School of Life Sciences

Arizona State University

Tempe, AZ 85287

Frank.Farruggia at asu.edu

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