Keynote for Biodiversity Heritage Library #BHLat10 event at NHM in London, 12 April 2016

1. BHL, BioStor, and beyond
#BHLat10
@rdmpage
http://iphylo.blogspot.com

2. #iamataxonomist

3. 3
Pinnotheres atrinicola Page, 1983

4. One species of peacrab had a parasite…
…what is it?

5. Sur un type nouveau d'Epicarides Rhopalione
uromyzon n. g. n. sp., parasite sous-abdominal
d'un Pinnothere

6. Rhopalione in BHL

7. Why BHL is cool #1
Accessibility

8. First impressions, meh…
• OMG it’s full of plants 
• It’s all old stuff 
• Where the $#@! are the articles?

9. “More hack, less yack”
“[to] be able to move some subset of the
world … from the leverage point of the
command line.”
Steven E. Jones The Emergence of the Digital Humanities

10. Why BHL is cool #2
It is hackable

11. No articles? No problem!
• Data is available for download
• Also an API (and OAI-PMH, yuck!)
• So, let’s go find the articles…

12. Find articles - “simples”
Title Volume Page
Journal Volume
Start page
– end pageArticle
Extracting scientific articles from a large digital archive: BioStor and the
Biodiversity Heritage Library doi:10.1186/1471-2105-12-187
Mapping between
BHL and articles

13. http://biostor.org/reference/102054

14. BioStor and Pintrest

15. BioStor and JournalMap

16. BioStor and BHL
articles

17. First impressions, meh…
• OMG it’s full of plants 
• It’s all old stuff 
• Where the $#@! are the articles?

18. Not so cool…

19. Scanning currently dominated by USDA

20. BHL-Europe: unhackable zombie

21. Where next?

23. Findability: DOIs for articles
10.5962/bhl.part.14773

24. Mickey Mouse is evil
http://artlawjournal.com/mickey-mouse-keeps-changing-copyright-law/

25. 100,000 articles from http://biostor.org (BHL)
1923 today

26. Synthetic documents
S. Michael Machines as readers: A solution to the copyright problem
“we proposed to scan works digitally to extract their
intellectual content, and then generate by machine
synthetic works that capture this content … and
distribute them free of copyright”

27. Cited, linkable specimens
NMNH Vertebrate Zoology
Herpetology Collections
11194
CAS Herpetology Collection Catalog
MCZ Herpetology Collection
Herpetology Collection (University
of Kansas Biodiversity Research
Center)
9619
6720
5818
http://iphylo.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/gbif-specimens-in-biostor-who-are-top.html

28. The case for a
PubMed Central for Biodiversity

29. Isn’t that, um, PubMed Central?...

30. Europe PMC

31. PubMed Central for biodiversity
• Taxonomic names
• Geographic localities
• Specimen codes
• Handle XML, PDF, OCR text
• Store facts as well as documents

32. Google figured out how to manage
abundance while every other media
company in the world was trying to
manufacture scarcity, and for that
we should be grateful.
Siva Vaidhyanathan The Googlization of everything
(and why we should worry)