GLAM/Newsletter/August 2025/Contents/Biodiversity Heritage Library report
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News on BHL transition and updates on work by BHLWiki Working Group members
BHL transition
The Biodiversity Heritage Library has recently announced that it has obtained a new fiscal sponsor - the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIF). CLIF will provide legal and financial infrastructure support to ensure BHL can continue its work as a digital library providing access to biodiversity knowledge. This means BHL now has a new administrative and financial base with CLIR which will help manage contracts, finances, HR, and grant administration.
After the soft-close of the BHL's call for support, they have released this transition update.
BHL initiates regular harvesting of identifiers from Wikidata
After the initial ingest of identifiers from Wikidata into the BHL catalogue in the spring of 2022 (as discussed in this BHL blog), BHL has now begun to regularly harvest identifiers for relevant authors and publications from Wikidata. This will take place every three months.
As a result of this most recent ingestion of data from Wikidata 52993 new author identifiers have been added to the BHL catalogue and 10739 new title identifiers were also added.
A csv error report has been generated for identifiers needing review. Siobhan Leachman has been working on these issues attempting to resolve any that relate to data in Wikidata. A summary of the work currently being undertaken by her to help resolve these issues can be seen here.
Improvements to the BHL Image Explorer
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Tiago Lubiana, previously the BHL Wikimedian in Residence, has made improvements to the BHL Image Explorer ensuring this tool's speed is improved. He is also preparing a submission of the tool for consideration for the Ebbe Nielsen Challenge.
Wikimedia and Biodiversity Data session at Living Data 2025
The preliminary program for the Wikimedia and Biodiversity Data session at the Living Data 2025 conference is available. The session, organized by Tiago, will happen on Wednesday, October 22, and includes talks from several people from BHL and the BHL-Wiki group, including Rod Page, Siobhan Leachman, Giovanna Fontenelle and Mike Lichtenberg.
Diff article on Tiago's work as BHL Wikimedian in Residence
Tiago has published a Diff article detailing the work he undertook as the Biodiversity Heritage Library's Wikimedian in Residence. The article can be found at this link.
BHL2Wiki Tool
Rod Page has reported that he has been improving the BHL2Wiki tool which has been broken as a result of the Wikidata graph split. BHL2Wiki assists editors to create Wikidata items for publications held in BHL that have a DOI.
