The Biodiversity Heritage Library is sponsoring a Code Challenge as
part of the Life and Literature conference being held in Chicago
November 14-15.
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a consortium of 12 natural
history and botanical libraries that cooperate to digitize and make
accessible the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their
collections and to make that literature available for open access and
responsible use as a part of a global “biodiversity commons.” BHL also
serves as the foundational literature component of the Encyclopedia of
Life (EOL). BHL content may be freely viewed through the online reader
or downloaded in part or as a complete work in PDF, OCR text, or
JPG2000 file formats.
Your challenge is to provide
a new, innovative way to use, disseminate or display BHL data
a description of what your project is trying to accomplish
the source code to reproduce the application
any libraries or supporting code needed to reproduce the application
any build instructions or scripts are needed to build application
or instructions how to run it
any notes about your experience implementing this code: how you
came up with your design, blind alleys you went up, or surprising
problems you ran into or anything else you want to share.
The dataset
Through local and global digitization efforts, BHL has digitized over
32 million pages of taxonomic literature, representing over 45,000
titles and 87,000 volumes (January 2011). The entire -corpus- dataset
is freely available and accessible via many open methods.
Timeline
Deadline for entries is October 17, 2011. The winner will be announced
on November 1, 2011.
More details are available on our website at
http://www.lifeandliterature.org/p/code-challenge.html
Thanks, and enter!
--j
--
John Mignault
Systems Librarian
The LuEsther T Mertz Library
The New York Botanical Garden
