[Taxacom] ZooBank Progress

Sat Apr 27 03:42:14 CDT 2013

Hi Rich,

Any reason ZooBank chose that particular copy of "Systema Naturae" to link too? 

One of the joys/pitfalls of BHL (which is an awesome resource), is the presence of multiple copies of the same thing, coupled with occasional problems such as page numbers being out of sync with images, or (my personal favourite) the page scans and OCR text being out of sync with each other (i.e., the page image and OCR text are for different pages).

There are other copies of Systema Naturae that don't seem to have this problem, e.g. http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/25034426 (I haven't checked all the pages in this scan).

Regards

Rod

On 27 Apr 2013, at 05:58, Richard Pyle wrote:

> Greetings Taxacomers....
> 
> Between actually working on developing ZooBank, and writing EPICALLY long
> emails to Taxacom, I've neglected to keep this community abreast of progress
> that's been happening with ZooBank.
> 
> To see what's been going on with ZooBank since the launch of the "new &
> improved" version last September, you can take a look at three progress
> reports that are available online:
> 
> First Month after launch:
> http://zoobank.org/docs/ZooBankReport_2012-09.pdf
> Fourth Quarter, 2012:
> http://zoobank.org/docs/ZooBankReport_2012-12.pdf
> First Quarter, 2013:
> http://zoobank.org/docs/ZooBankReport_2013-03.pdf
> 
> (All of these reports, and all future reports, are linked from the bottom of
> the "About" page in ZooBank: http://zoobank.org/about -- and will also be
> added to the ICZN site.)
> 
> As I hope is clear from these reports, the pace of ZooBank improvements is
> accelerating (mostly due to Rob Whitton), and I hope (and believe) the
> second-quarter report for this year will be even more full of new features
> than the first-quarter report is.
> 
> Along those lines, I wanted to report on two recent (i.e., since the last
> quarterly report) developments in ZooBank that may be of particular interest
> to Taxacom folks (both of which have some relevance to recent threads on
> data quality assurance and "crowd-sourcing" of content).
> 
> First, earlier today we launched a new feature that links ZooBank with the
> Biodiversity Heritage Library.  This is the first of several key features
> that emerged from a workshop between representatives of GNA/BHL/IPNI/IF in
> Hawaii last month.
> 
> Whenever possible, on a ZooBank page for a new species name, we now include
> a link to the BHL page.  Currently, we have this feature working reasonably
> well for about 38,000 name records in ZooBank, and we hope to triple that
> within the next month or so.
> 
> To see an example, find a name in ZooBank that was published in an older
> journal likely to be in BHL (we've started linking Journal articles -- but
> only a few books so far).  Linnaeus, 1758 (Systema Naturae) is one of the
> books we have linked, so search for your favorite name in Linnaeus to see
> the new feature. Here is an example:
> http://zoobank.org/A437F5A3-935C-4FB5-BA7D-B56E240C6D06 
> 
> But here's the thing:  We link most of these pages using the BHL OpenURL
> service -- which is very good, but not always perfect.  Thus, we've added a
> new feature which we plan to expand on ZooBank over time.  The feature is
> signaled by a new icon with "Contribute" added to the ZooBank logo (you'll
> see it above the BHL page image in the link above).  This icon means "you
> can help us by clicking here".  If you point your mouse at the icon, you'll
> see a specific message for how you can help (note: you must be logged into
> you ZooBank account to provide this sort of help).  In this particular case,
> you can help by confirming if the OpenURL has found the correct page.  Click
> on the "Contribute" icon or the page image thumbnail to see a form that lets
> you jump around to different pages. Once you can confirm that you're looking
> at the correct page, there's a button you can click to create a direct link
> to that page, after which we no longer rely on the OpenURL service, but
> instead link directly to that page. If you want to go to the BHL site for
> the page, click on the BHL logo below the page image thumbnail.
> 
> One of the reasons we need to crowd-source this is that there are
> imperfections in the way that BHL assigns page numbers to things.  In the
> example of Linnaeus 1758, if you view pages prior to page 578, you'll get
> the correct page image.  But starting at page 578, you'll see there is a
> 2-page offset (pages 576 and 577 are repeated as page 578 and 579).  The
> example in the link above (genus Acarus) is on pg. 615, so you actually get
> to the image of page 613 using the OpenURL service.  What we want to do is
> get a human to confirm the link as the real page 615 (which is indexed in
> BHL as 617), and that the name in question really does appear on that page.
> This process allows us to bypass the "page" as a number, and establish a
> direct link to the BHL page identifier (which is persistent for the page
> image, not for the page number).  Note: this is NOT a "dis" against BHL.
> It's actually AMAZING how accurate their OpenURL links are in the vast
> majority of cases.  However, we're striving for perfection on the
> cross-linking, which is why we use the OpenURL service to get you to what is
> likely the right page, but then give you, the user, the opportunity to
> "crowd-source" confirm or correct the specific page link.
> 
> This is all in keeping with a basic underlying theme of the Global Names
> Architecture to build cross-links between different databases, and to
> harvest the passion of the broader community to crowd-source this sort of
> thing.  In this case, we're building a cross-link between a ZooBank record
> and a BHL page.  The idea is to build many, many, many more of these kinds
> of links using GNA services, which we hope will be used by many, many
> different websites and web-based biodiversity databases.
> 
> The other new feature in ZooBank I wanted to mention to this group relates
> to Journal editors and publishers. About a week ago I sent an email to a
> list of persons associated with journal publishers who have expressed
> interest in access to better features on ZooBank to allow publishers to
> create and maintain ZooBank registrations associated with the journals that
> they edit/publish.  There are two different sets of features we're working
> on:  one available through the existing ZooBank website, and another
> involving automatic submission of content to ZooBank via XML documents
> (rather than manually through the web site).  The latter is still in
> development, but the former is now available.  
> 
> I wanted to pass this on to Taxcom to let anyone who is associated with a
> journal publisher (as a publication staff member, or as an Editor) who did
> not receive my email a week ago, and who is interested in accessing these
> new features for publishers/editors of journals, know about the new
> services, and to contact me offline for more details.  Some of these new
> features apply to all ZooBank Contributors; to see them, simply login to
> ZooBank and click on your name at the top of the ZooBank web page banner.
> 
> I hope to be able to provide similar reports on new features in ZooBank over
> the coming months.
> 
> Aloha,
> Rich
> 
> Richard L. Pyle, PhD
> Database Coordinator for Natural Sciences
> Associate Zoologist in Ichthyology
> Dive Safety Officer
> Department of Natural Sciences, Bishop Museum
> 1525 Bernice St., Honolulu, HI 96817
> Ph: (808)848-4115, Fax: (808)847-8252
> email: deepreef at bishopmuseum.org
> http://hbs.bishopmuseum.org/staff/pylerichard.html
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Taxacom Mailing List
> Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
> http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom
> 
> The Taxacom Archive back to 1992 may be searched with either of these methods:
> 
> (1) by visiting http://taxacom.markmail.org
> 
> (2) a Google search specified as:  site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/taxacom  your search terms here
> 
> Celebrating 26 years of Taxacom in 2013.
> 

---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

Email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
Tel: +44 141 330 4778
Fax: +44 141 330 2792
Skype: rdmpage
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/rdmpage
Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage
Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com
Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roderic_D._M._Page
Citations: http://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=4Z5WABAAAAAJ
ORCID id: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7101-9767