FAQ

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is an open access digital library that aggregates digitized monographs, journal volumes, and archival materials from hundreds of different contributors. In some cases, a consecutive series of journal volumes are available, but in other cases there are gaps in coverage. With the metadata available it is difficult, if not impossible, to accurately identify gaps in coverage.  Identifying what is available is easy; identifying what is missing (the gaps) is hard.

These gaps in coverage occur for a variety of reasons: the volumes were not available for digitization due to contributor holdings or condition of the materials, or copyright restrictions prevented BHL from including the volumes in its open access repository. In order to more accurately present these coverage gaps, BHL followed guideline 6.4.6 (pg.17) in “NISO RP-9-2014, KBART Phase II Recommended Practice” where “A title should be listed twice if there is a coverage gap of greater than or equal to 12 months, with only the coverage field changing.”

The NISO KBART Standing Committee reviewed BHL’s KBART data file in 2020 and recommended each volume be listed individually. BHL’s KBART file contains many redundancies, but guarantees that each volume that is held in the collection is represented accurately. Therefore, when a new volume of a title is added to BHL’s collection, a new item (row) is added to the KBART file for that title. From the options listed in the BHL KBART Documentation, the decision was made to elect option 2 as the best method to provide holdings data in BHL’s KBART file.

https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/Data/KBART/

Many of the items in BHL’s collection are in the public domain and free to reuse without risk of copyright infringement. Check the <Copyright Status> field to determine the copyright status of any given item in our collection.

BHL does our best to indicate the copyright status of each item digitized by our partner institutions. Ultimately, BHL does not hold copyright on the materials in our collection and cannot grant permission. It is up to you to review the copyright status of the image or item you wish to reuse and abide by any copyright restrictions that may apply. For additional guidance on reusing content from BHL, visit Copyright and Reuse.

Generally speaking, the country where you plan to use the content and the nature of the use dictate what you can/cannot do as well as the level of risk involved. Commercial use carries higher risk than non-commercial use and in different countries there are different copyright laws governing use. Please review the copyright law for the country in which you plan to use or publish the content. BHL recommends consulting the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) Lex database at  https://wipolex.wipo.int/en/main/legislation for further information.

If the content you wish to reuse is from a work where the <Copyright Status> is…:

“In copyright. Digitized with the permission of the rights holder.”

…you may use the materials for non-commercial purposes so long as you provide attribution to the rights holder and share the materials under the same license. Please see the specific terms set forth in the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license (CC BY-NC-SA license).

Tags: permission, reuse, republication, licensing, license, copyright

The Biodiversity Heritage Library and Plazi joint Statement of Collaboration describes the cooperation and collaboration of BHL and Plazi, outlining common goals and areas of common interests and clarifying key areas of responsibility.

Tags: partnerships, reciprocal partners, BLR, FAIR data, GBIF

No, BHL can only accept materials into its collection from contributors that are part of our consortium or from materials available within the Internet Archive corpus that conform to our metadata and subject matter standards.

We work directly with the Internet Archive to often digitize, as well as store and serve our materials through our website. Materials from the Internet Archive that contain the appropriate metadata and scope may be considered for inclusion in the BHL collection.

BHL is not able to include materials from other digital repositories, such as HathiTrust and Google Books, for a variety of reasons including:

• legal restrictions that prevent the distribution of materials across various digital repositories
• technical incongruities with file formats and/or metadata that prevent the materials from being compatible with our digital library file structure.

Tags: harvest, IA, selection, digitization, collection development

We do not offer advertising placement or other advertising opportunities for the Biodiversity Heritage Library at this time.

If you would like to learn more about our program, or receive notification about potential future opportunities, please subscribe to our mailing list.

Tags: promotion, product placement, link placement, banners, link insertion, post placement, in-text link

Thank you for your interest in contributing a guest post to the Biodiversity Heritage Library Blog.

BHL only accepts solicited guest blog posts. If you would like to submit your resume, qualifications, and examples of your work for consideration, please email [email protected]. After review, your information may be added to our files for future reference. If we are interested in soliciting a post, we may contact you. Please note that BHL does not provide compensation for guest posts.

Tags: outreach, press room, marketing, public affairs, media, public relations, communication, resources, announcements, alerts, content development, content marketing

Thank you for considering the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Incorporating content from outside our consortium partnership is tricky, but we would be glad to review your content for inclusion. Please keep in mind that the BHL is a voluntarily staffed consortium program that coordinates among its partners to incorporate content as time and resources allow.

For Publishers, we need the following:

• Permission if the material is in copyright:
  • Explicit permission from the copyright holder is required in writing. BHL requires rights holders to sign a standard license agreement form legally permitting us to add in-copyright content to our free and open access collection. Please review a sample of our permissions agreement form as well as our Permissions page for more information. Our standard agreement applies a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

• Metadata:
  • BHL aggregates bibliographic information from the existing library catalogs of our consortium partnership, or WorldCat (https://www.worldcat.org/). Please verify that your content is cataloged.
• Resources:
  • We will then work within our consortium to find at least one BHL partner who can digitize or upload the materials on your behalf.

For Individuals

BHL is a digitization program rather than publishing organization. We cannot accept contributions to our digital library directly from individuals. If you are the sole copyright holder of a publication that is held by one of our consortium library partners we can work with you to obtain permission to include the work in our collection. We will then 1) digitize the content from a physical copy or 2) upload an existing electronic copy.

For Institutions or Organizations

The Biodiversity Heritage Library accepts content into our collection from our consortium partners. In addition, we are able to harvest selected biodiversity relevant content held within the Internet Archive’s “texts” collection.  At this time, BHL is not accepting applications for new consortium partners. We will continue to evaluate our capacity to expand our partnerships into the future and provide updates as appropriate. Please stay tuned.

Please Note

Depending on the extent and condition of materials to be incorporated, as well as existing priorities, we will process the content for inclusion at our earliest convenience.

Content is incorporated in one of two methods: 1) through digitization of the physical copies held within our BHL partner library collections or 2) uploaded from electronic-born materials, typically in PDF format. It is not common that we request materials directly from publishers but should we find we are missing any issues we will be in contact to request donations, if at all possible.

Please note that it may take considerable time to process the complete set of image files and metadata into our digital library. For more information on how we build and maintain our collection, please refer to our collection development policy.

Tags: digitize, digitization, upload, collection development, get involved, licensing, copyright, permissions, contribute

No, the BHL is strictly a digital library and not able to  accept physical materials. BHL is made up of a consortium of institutions  that collaboratively digitize their respective collections. As such BHL is not the digital version of a single collection, but a series of collections virtually brought together into our digital repository.

Please consider donating your materials to one of our partner institutions or to your local library.

Tags: selection, collection development, donate

Yes. Donations from individuals and organizations are essential to BHL’s long-term sustainability.

Support BHL: Ways to Give

Your support helps keep BHL free and open, sustain the staff and infrastructure behind it, modernize its technology, and ensure that biodiversity knowledge remains available to researchers, conservationists, educators, communities, and curious readers worldwide.

You can support BHL through a one-time, monthly, or annual gift, as well as through a range of other giving options.

Thank you to everyone helping secure BHL’s future.

The OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, text in BHL is generally automatically-generated and uncorrected, meaning that it may be incomplete or contain errors. We do not yet have a way for users to directly correct the OCR within BHL.

We have implemented functionality to allow BHL Partners to upload transcriptions in place of the automatically-generated OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for archival materials digitized in BHL. You are welcome to help improve the OCR for these materials by participating in various Partner crowdsourcing projects  from which BHL sources transcriptions, such as the Smithsonian Transcription Center, FromThePage, and DigiVol.

Tags: crowdsourcing, OCR, text recognition, text correction, citizen science

At this time, the Biodiversity Heritage Library is not accepting applications for new consortium partners. We will continue to evaluate our capacity to expand our partnerships into the future and provide updates as appropriate. Please stay tuned.

Tags: member, affiliate, contributor, participate, get involved, contribute

We have implemented functionality to allow BHL Staff to upload transcriptions in place of the automatically-generated OCR (Optical Character Recognition) text for digitized materials in BHL’s collection. This functionality supports transcriptions generated as part of in-house or crowdsourced transcription projects hosted by BHL Partners. The Show Text tab now indicates whether the text has been:

1. automatically generated and uncorrected;
2. automatically generated and error corrected, by machines, which may still include inconsistencies;
3. or manually transcribed by humans.

Please note that BHL’s OCR is generated by its Internet Archive digitization partner using Tesseract Open Source OCR (as of 2020) or ABBYYFineReader.

Web-based crowdsource transcription projects are largely managed through the following providers, DigiVol, FromThePage, and Smithsonian Transcription Center.

Especially for archival materials, like field notes and correspondence with handwritten text, transcriptions make these items full-text searchable and enable our taxonomic name recognition software to index scientific names within their pages. Since the transcribed text can be viewed alongside the digitized page image, users can also more easily read materials with difficult-to-decipher handwriting. Thus, this new functionality makes it easier for researchers and the public to explore these valuable primary source materials and access specific information from their pages.

Interested in transcribing materials? Several BHL Partners have transcription projects on various crowdsourcing platforms. Visit our Volunteer page to explore the opportunities and get involved.

Tags: crowdsourcing, citizen science, transcription, OCR, full text search, archives

BHL produces stable URLs for our content and will ensure viability of these URLs. Please read the following blog post for an explanation of how BHL redirects certain IDs when a book has been taken offline.

Stable URLs are available for the following areas of content, with examples:

• Subject: Insects
  http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/subject/Insects
• Author: Darwin, Charles, (1809 – 1882)
  http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/creator/93
• Title: The Journal of the Linnean Society
  http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/350
• Item/Book: The Journal of the Linnean Society, v. 8 1865
  http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/8361
• Article: Davidse, G, & Pohl, R. New taxa and nomenclatural combinations of Mesoamerican grasses (Poaceae). Novon a journal of botanical nomenclature from the Missouri Botanical Garden, 2,81-110. https://doi.org/10.2307/3391667
  https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/part/2491
• Page: Pl. XXX  Falco Aesalon from Die Raubvögel Deutschlands und des angrenzenden Mitteleuropas… http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/47850703

With regards to persistent identifiers, BHL also assigns DOIs to a selection of its content. Learn more.

Tags: URI, permalink, linking, identifiers, persistent identifiers

Yes. BHL’s online donation form supports more than 135 currencies. It will automatically detect your location and display donation amounts in your local currency, although you can select a different available currency if needed.

Your donation receipt will show the amount in the currency you used. BHL receives and reports donations in US dollars.

Make an online donation or visit our Ways to Give page to explore other options.

Yes you can! To search inside a book in BHL, navigate to the top right corner of the book viewer, select the Search Inside tab and enter your search terms.

In that same panel, results will display the pages where your search terms are found, along with snippets of the surrounding text. Navigate to any of those pages by clicking on the hyperlinked page number.

There are also two alternative “search inside” methods for searching within each individual book from outside of the book viewer:

1. Search using the Internet Archive’s interface
   From the book viewer, go to the upper right hand corner of the screen. Select the “Download Contents” drop-down menu, choose “View at Internet Archive.” You are now viewing the item on the Internet Archive’s website. Select the magnifying glass icon to the right of the book. Note: Do not use the top right search bar – this searches the entire Internet Archive Corpus.
2. Download and search the full PDF
   From the book viewer, go to the upper right hand corner of the screen. Select the “Download Contents” drop-down menu, choose “Download Book.” Select PDF to download the entire book/volume as a PDF with the full text included as a layer. To search, use your PDF viewer’s search tool (often a magnifying glass icon), or Ctrl+F (Command+F on a Mac)

IMPORTANT: the full text provided by IA/BHL is uncorrected text derived automatically through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. As it is automatically generated and uncorrected, it may contain errors. Full text search is a powerful research tool, but should not be considered exhaustive. Learn more about how full text search works in BHL.

Tags: user interface, book viewer, display, find

Many of the items in BHL’s collection are in the public domain and free to reuse without risk of copyright infringement. Check the <Copyright Status> field to determine the copyright status of any given item in our collection.

BHL does our best to indicate the copyright status of each item digitized by our partner institutions. Ultimately, BHL does not hold copyright on the materials in our collection and cannot grant permission. It is up to you to review the copyright status of the image or item you wish to reuse and abide by any copyright restrictions that may apply. For additional guidance on reusing content from BHL, visit Copyright and Reuse.

Generally speaking, the country where you plan to use the content and the nature of the use dictate what you can/cannot do as well as the level of risk involved. Commercial use carries higher risk than non-commercial use and in different countries there are different copyright laws governing use. Please review the copyright law for the country in which you plan to use or publish the content. BHL recommends consulting the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) Lex database at  https://wipolex.wipo.int/en/main/legislation for further information.

If the content you wish to reuse is from a work where the <Copyright Status> is…:

“In copyright. Digitized with the permission of the rights holder.”

…you may use the materials for non-commercial purposes so long as you provide attribution to the rights holder and share the materials under the same license. Please see the specific terms set forth in the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license (CC BY-NC-SA license).

Tags: permission, reuse, republication, licensing, license, copyright

We will take suggestions from users about additional materials to include in our collection but we cannot guarantee fulfillment of any requests submitted.  We retain requests received from our users as a running list of potential additions and will process requests as time and resources allow. Please keep in mind that it commonly takes several years before requests are fulfilled.

Please review our Guidelines for Submitting Scanning Requests before submitting your request via this form.

Tags: digitize, digitization, recommendations, collections, collection development, contribute

The Biodiversity Heritage Library follows established practices for cataloging works. Each book or journal in BHL’s collection is represented by a bibliographic metadata record that describes the title, creator(s), and other relevant information about the work’s creation and content. The creator(s) listed as part of the records are the personal, family, or corporate names responsible for the overall production of the work. Requests to add additional creators will be considered by the Cataloging and Metadata Committee if the creator is noted on the chief source of information (i.e. the title page) and/or is the predominant contributor to the work (i.e the sole illustrator). This criteria is in accordance with the following factors:

• cataloging best practices – contributions to portions of a work may not qualify under standard cataloging rules for addition at the title level,
• resource constraints – BHL lacks dedicated cataloging resources to generate original catalog records at scale, 
• technical constraints of BHL’s database model – BHL’s collection is primarily structured around books, volumes, and articles. It is not possible to add page level metadata at this time.

Enriching Page Level Metadata

BHL acknowledges the work being done to highlight historically marginalized creators whose contributions have gone unrecognized. For now, the best way to add illustrator or photographer information at the page level is to add tags with the creator name(s) to the images in BHL’s Flickr photostream. Tagging the images in Flickr, uploaded from works in BHL, best allows us to identify the creator of the specific images they contributed to the work. Please see our Flickr image tagging guide for instructions.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is an open access digital library that aggregates digitized monographs, journal volumes, and archival materials from hundreds of different contributors. In some cases, a consecutive series of journal volumes are available, but in other cases there are gaps in coverage. With the metadata available it is difficult, if not impossible, to accurately identify gaps in coverage.  Identifying what is available is easy; identifying what is missing (the gaps) is hard.

These gaps in coverage occur for a variety of reasons: the volumes were not available for digitization due to contributor holdings or condition of the materials, or copyright restrictions prevented BHL from including the volumes in its open access repository. In order to more accurately present these coverage gaps, BHL followed guideline 6.4.6 (pg.17) in “NISO RP-9-2014, KBART Phase II Recommended Practice” where “A title should be listed twice if there is a coverage gap of greater than or equal to 12 months, with only the coverage field changing.”

The NISO KBART Standing Committee reviewed BHL’s KBART data file in 2020 and recommended each volume be listed individually. BHL’s KBART file contains many redundancies, but guarantees that each volume that is held in the collection is represented accurately. Therefore, when a new volume of a title is added to BHL’s collection, a new item (row) is added to the KBART file for that title. From the options listed in the BHL KBART Documentation, the decision was made to elect option 2 as the best method to provide holdings data in BHL’s KBART file.

https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/Data/KBART/

We do not offer advertising placement or other advertising opportunities for the Biodiversity Heritage Library at this time.

If you would like to learn more about our program, or receive notification about potential future opportunities, please subscribe to our mailing list.

Tags: promotion, product placement, link placement, banners, link insertion, post placement, in-text link

Thank you for your interest in contributing a guest post to the Biodiversity Heritage Library Blog.

BHL only accepts solicited guest blog posts. If you would like to submit your resume, qualifications, and examples of your work for consideration, please email [email protected]. After review, your information may be added to our files for future reference. If we are interested in soliciting a post, we may contact you. Please note that BHL does not provide compensation for guest posts.

Tags: outreach, press room, marketing, public affairs, media, public relations, communication, resources, announcements, alerts, content development, content marketing

The Biodiversity Heritage Library uses taxonomic intelligence tools, including gnfinder developed by Global Names Architecture, to locate, verify, and record scientific names located within the text of each digitized page. The text used for this identification is usually uncorrected OCR, so may not include all results expected or visible in the page.

Learn more about how the Taxonomic Name Recognition algorithm in BHL works.

Tags: taxonomy, taxa, taxon, species, binomial, genus, trinomial, optical character recognition

Of course. If you know the title of the book you are looking for and none of the other approaches to searching the BHL corpus has worked for you, try doing a site-specific Google search of BHL. To do this:

1. go to www.google.com
2. in the search box, enter your search terms
3. after your search terms, add site:biodiversitylibrary.org
4. press enter!

This makes it possible to use Google’s search algorithm on BHL’s website (searches book metadata).

Example search string: “resultats campagnes scientifiques accomplies site:biodiversitylibrary.org”

Yes you can! To search inside a book in BHL, navigate to the top right corner of the book viewer, select the Search Inside tab and enter your search terms.

In that same panel, results will display the pages where your search terms are found, along with snippets of the surrounding text. Navigate to any of those pages by clicking on the hyperlinked page number.

There are also two alternative “search inside” methods for searching within each individual book from outside of the book viewer:

1. Search using the Internet Archive’s interface
   From the book viewer, go to the upper right hand corner of the screen. Select the “Download Contents” drop-down menu, choose “View at Internet Archive.” You are now viewing the item on the Internet Archive’s website. Select the magnifying glass icon to the right of the book. Note: Do not use the top right search bar – this searches the entire Internet Archive Corpus.
2. Download and search the full PDF
   From the book viewer, go to the upper right hand corner of the screen. Select the “Download Contents” drop-down menu, choose “Download Book.” Select PDF to download the entire book/volume as a PDF with the full text included as a layer. To search, use your PDF viewer’s search tool (often a magnifying glass icon), or Ctrl+F (Command+F on a Mac)

IMPORTANT: the full text provided by IA/BHL is uncorrected text derived automatically through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. As it is automatically generated and uncorrected, it may contain errors. Full text search is a powerful research tool, but should not be considered exhaustive. Learn more about how full text search works in BHL.

Tags: user interface, book viewer, display, find

We have implemented functionality to allow BHL Staff to upload transcriptions in place of the automatically-generated OCR (Optical Character Recognition) text for digitized materials in BHL’s collection. This functionality supports transcriptions generated as part of in-house or crowdsourced transcription projects hosted by BHL Partners. The Show Text tab now indicates whether the text has been:

1. automatically generated and uncorrected;
2. automatically generated and error corrected, by machines, which may still include inconsistencies;
3. or manually transcribed by humans.

Please note that BHL’s OCR is generated by its Internet Archive digitization partner using Tesseract Open Source OCR (as of 2020) or ABBYYFineReader.

Web-based crowdsource transcription projects are largely managed through the following providers, DigiVol, FromThePage, and Smithsonian Transcription Center.

Especially for archival materials, like field notes and correspondence with handwritten text, transcriptions make these items full-text searchable and enable our taxonomic name recognition software to index scientific names within their pages. Since the transcribed text can be viewed alongside the digitized page image, users can also more easily read materials with difficult-to-decipher handwriting. Thus, this new functionality makes it easier for researchers and the public to explore these valuable primary source materials and access specific information from their pages.

Interested in transcribing materials? Several BHL Partners have transcription projects on various crowdsourcing platforms. Visit our Volunteer page to explore the opportunities and get involved.

Tags: crowdsourcing, citizen science, transcription, OCR, full text search, archives

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is an open access digital library that aggregates digitized monographs, journal volumes, and archival materials from hundreds of different contributors. In some cases, a consecutive series of journal volumes are available, but in other cases there are gaps in coverage. With the metadata available it is difficult, if not impossible, to accurately identify gaps in coverage.  Identifying what is available is easy; identifying what is missing (the gaps) is hard.

These gaps in coverage occur for a variety of reasons: the volumes were not available for digitization due to contributor holdings or condition of the materials, or copyright restrictions prevented BHL from including the volumes in its open access repository. In order to more accurately present these coverage gaps, BHL followed guideline 6.4.6 (pg.17) in “NISO RP-9-2014, KBART Phase II Recommended Practice” where “A title should be listed twice if there is a coverage gap of greater than or equal to 12 months, with only the coverage field changing.”

The NISO KBART Standing Committee reviewed BHL’s KBART data file in 2020 and recommended each volume be listed individually. BHL’s KBART file contains many redundancies, but guarantees that each volume that is held in the collection is represented accurately. Therefore, when a new volume of a title is added to BHL’s collection, a new item (row) is added to the KBART file for that title. From the options listed in the BHL KBART Documentation, the decision was made to elect option 2 as the best method to provide holdings data in BHL’s KBART file.

https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/Data/KBART/

The OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, text in BHL is generally automatically-generated and uncorrected, meaning that it may be incomplete or contain errors. We do not yet have a way for users to directly correct the OCR within BHL.

We have implemented functionality to allow BHL Partners to upload transcriptions in place of the automatically-generated OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for archival materials digitized in BHL. You are welcome to help improve the OCR for these materials by participating in various Partner crowdsourcing projects  from which BHL sources transcriptions, such as the Smithsonian Transcription Center, FromThePage, and DigiVol.

Tags: crowdsourcing, OCR, text recognition, text correction, citizen science

Indeed we do and we encourage people to reuse our data in new and innovative ways! Please see more information about our APIs and other Developer and Data Tools.

Tags: data export, data mining, text mining, technical development, code

BHL produces stable URLs for our content and will ensure viability of these URLs. Please read the following blog post for an explanation of how BHL redirects certain IDs when a book has been taken offline.

Stable URLs are available for the following areas of content, with examples:

• Subject: Insects
  http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/subject/Insects
• Author: Darwin, Charles, (1809 – 1882)
  http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/creator/93
• Title: The Journal of the Linnean Society
  http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/350
• Item/Book: The Journal of the Linnean Society, v. 8 1865
  http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/8361
• Article: Davidse, G, & Pohl, R. New taxa and nomenclatural combinations of Mesoamerican grasses (Poaceae). Novon a journal of botanical nomenclature from the Missouri Botanical Garden, 2,81-110. https://doi.org/10.2307/3391667
  https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/part/2491
• Page: Pl. XXX  Falco Aesalon from Die Raubvögel Deutschlands und des angrenzenden Mitteleuropas… http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/47850703

With regards to persistent identifiers, BHL also assigns DOIs to a selection of its content. Learn more.

Tags: URI, permalink, linking, identifiers, persistent identifiers

We have implemented functionality to allow BHL Staff to upload transcriptions in place of the automatically-generated OCR (Optical Character Recognition) text for digitized materials in BHL’s collection. This functionality supports transcriptions generated as part of in-house or crowdsourced transcription projects hosted by BHL Partners. The Show Text tab now indicates whether the text has been:

1. automatically generated and uncorrected;
2. automatically generated and error corrected, by machines, which may still include inconsistencies;
3. or manually transcribed by humans.

Please note that BHL’s OCR is generated by its Internet Archive digitization partner using Tesseract Open Source OCR (as of 2020) or ABBYYFineReader.

Web-based crowdsource transcription projects are largely managed through the following providers, DigiVol, FromThePage, and Smithsonian Transcription Center.

Especially for archival materials, like field notes and correspondence with handwritten text, transcriptions make these items full-text searchable and enable our taxonomic name recognition software to index scientific names within their pages. Since the transcribed text can be viewed alongside the digitized page image, users can also more easily read materials with difficult-to-decipher handwriting. Thus, this new functionality makes it easier for researchers and the public to explore these valuable primary source materials and access specific information from their pages.

Interested in transcribing materials? Several BHL Partners have transcription projects on various crowdsourcing platforms. Visit our Volunteer page to explore the opportunities and get involved.

Tags: crowdsourcing, citizen science, transcription, OCR, full text search, archives

The Biodiversity Heritage Library uses taxonomic intelligence tools, including gnfinder developed by Global Names Architecture, to locate, verify, and record scientific names located within the text of each digitized page. The text used for this identification is usually uncorrected OCR, so may not include all results expected or visible in the page.

Learn more about how the Taxonomic Name Recognition algorithm in BHL works.

Tags: taxonomy, taxa, taxon, species, binomial, genus, trinomial, optical character recognition