Biodiversity Information Science and Standards :
Conference Abstract
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Corresponding author: Elisa Herrmann (elisa.herrmann@mfn.berlin)
Received: 28 Sep 2020 | Published: 06 Oct 2020
© 2020 Elisa Herrmann
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Herrmann E (2020) Building the Biodiversity Heritage Library's Technical Strategy. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 4: e59084. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.4.59084
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In 2016 the United Nations published the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It quickly became clear that information is a catalyst for almost every goal, and enhancing information access is necessary to achieve and ultimately improve global community life. The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is therefore an invaluable resource for redressing inequallities as it provides information and literature as an open access library. But there are also still hurdles to overcome to ensure information for all. In the following, we will focus on technical developments outlined in the BHL’s technical strategy.
One challenge is the different digital infrastructures resulting in limited access to the web-based BHL. In 2019, only 53.6% of the global population accessed the internet (
Furthermore the technical strategy focuses on the provision of services and tools for various usage scenarios by implementing a responsive design. In 2019, mobile devices, such as mobile phones and tablets, accounted for 54% of all page views worldwide (
Another challenge is the multilingual user experience. The multilingualism of BHL will become an essential part of the technological development to address the global biodiversity community and to reflect the worldwide biodiversity research. We aim to achieve this through a multilingual user interface and multilingual search options.
The services and tools mentioned above require a high quality database, especially machine-readable text. The improvement of optical character recognition (OCR) is fundamentally important for further technological developments. Good OCR results ensure a comprehensive search in the entire corpus, and with further technological possibilities, data could be added that goes beyond the pure text. Currently taxonomic names are parsed and linked to the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), giving users the opportunities to search for taxonomic synonyms. In the future, this enrichment could be used for more data, such as collection data, geographical names, etc. In the challenge of improving and enriching the data, the BHL will depend on its large community, for example in crowdsourcing transcription projects.
In order to reach those objectives and to continue to offer BHL's services to the global community in the best possible way, we need to monitor best practices in digital library and bioinformatics developments and implement them wherever possible. The BHL consortium will have to rely on partnerships and collaborations to fulfill this plan. We are therefore looking into cooperation with other consortia and will also explore alternative technological development models where third parties would develop apps and services from open BHL data.
Taking all the mentioned approaches into account, the BHL will develop from a mainly literature library to a data library. It will be our task to create open source software and tools, like better APIs, to support the re-use of the data. This goes along with the aim to increase the awareness of the BHL within the biodiversity community as it is set in the BHL Strategic Plan 2020-2025 (
To draw a conclusion, the BHL's technical strategy focuses on five main objectives to advance information access for the biodiversity community worldwide:
The principle of our work is to adapt BHL to current technological, scientific and social developments in order to provide the global community with the best possible research tool for biodiversity research and to enhance the achievement of the SDGs.
technical development, information infrastructure, open access, open data
Elisa Herrmann
TDWG 2020