BHL Portal FAQ

This page is no longer attached to the Public facing wiki....welcome to the FAQ idea parking lot! New FAQ's need to be manually added to the public facing wiki.

Question: Missing Volumes

Why do some of the historical serial publications (such as the Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology) have missing volumes?
Answer: Right now, items from the historical publications that aren’t yet scanned may in the queue. The gap usually means that the item has a foldout, is oversize, or otherwise needs special handling. We’re working to get these done as soon as possible.

Question: Navigation How-to

Where can I get more information about how to navigate BHL's website? Who/Where can I go for help?

Question: PDF download times

It sometimes takes very long for the PDF generator to create a file and when it comes, the file is very large. Why?
Answer: In some cases, material scanned from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library was created in a file format that was not compressed as much as in other scanning workflows. If you're having trouble with large files, check the source. If they are from MOBOT, that is the likely cause. We are working on a solution to this problem for both MOBOT and other large PDF files.

Question: Requesting a title

There is a title that I would like to see available in the BHL portal. How do I go about recommending that it be added and how long does this take?
Answer: Best case scenario is 1 month for items within one of the partner library holdings that do not have foldouts, are oversize, or otherwise need special handling. The partners work closely together to locate a requested work and send it for scanning, however the timing with regard to pulling and scanning varies for each institution. Overall, the time it takes from shelf to availability in BHL depends on a complex formula of location, size or condition of the work, processing, quality assurance, and harvesting of images and metadata into the BHL website, or portal.

Question: Taxonomic Name Search

How do I go about searching BHL for a taxonomic name?

Question: PDF Generator

Why is my downloaded PDF blank, except for a cover page?
Why does my downloaded PDF say "pdf unavailable"?

Question: In looking at a serial title, all the volumes out of order. The order seems random. Can this be fixed?

Answer: Serial volumes are listed as they are deposited in the database. They can be re-ordered once all volumes are deposited. Anytime a new volume is added to the record, the order will change so we must wait until all volumes are deposited to correctly order the volumes.

Question: What is the BibTex format that I see as a download option?

BibTex (http://www.bibtex.org/) is a common format for citations/references and is supported by all the major software vendors (EndNote, RefWorks, Zotero, Biblio). This functionality that lets a user view & export a BibTex file for any title, including its items, from the bibliography page, as in this example:

http://beta.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/1102

BHL is also going to make this format available for download alongside our custom data exports, such that users can download a BibTex file

that contains 1) all the *titles* in BHL including links to each, and 2) all the *items* in BHL (each volume) along with links. We need this export to move title-level metadata from the BHL portal to the article repository, so thought we might as well make the file available for others to use.

In effect, this would put BHL titles & volumes in a format easily understood by existing reference management applications.