I am exploring adding species to GBIF that have their first descriptions in the Biodiversity heritage Library (BHL). This would be a first step towards complementing the work Plazi are doing for the recent taxonomic literature. As a test case I created a Darwin Core Archive for Aphrophora impressa together with a link to a page image from BHL and the text from that page (let’s ignore for the moment the quality of that text). The data set is BHL GBIF test The record it contains Aphrophora impressa Jacobi, 1944 is displayed like this:
Note the “Overview” tab and the page image is shown as a thumbnail.
In contrast, a record from Plazi (such as Metachelifer takensis Li & Shi 2022) has a “Treatment” tab and the images are displayed alongside (or below) the text.
Ideally the record I uploaded would be displayed the same way, but it’s not obvious to me how to achieve that. The DwCA file I’ve created is modelled on the files Plazi supplies. What information does GBIF need to interpret the BHL record as a treatment?
@dnoesgaard Ah that makes sense. I see that a couple of BHL-endorsed publishers are there already (although one looks to be a test case “UAT”). I’m guessing @UDCMRK and @trobertson will have a conversation about adding other BHL publishers if the plan to add BHL pages goes ahead. The example I created was simply a proof of concept to test how easy it was to create such content.
It is very Plazi specific yes. Also in other places. It parses the verbatim data and looks for specific extensions that Plazi use in specific ways. It is far from ideal, but (as i understand it) one of those cases where we would really like to do something, but do not actually have the data model and content to do so in a generalised manner. So instead we do something and hope it will generate momentum to do it properly later on.
