Externally hosted content

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From William Ulate (7/15/13)
I met with the EC on Thursday and the topic came out and then talked with this with Martin on Friday (our Wed. meeting was moved to Fri).

As part of the Global Names project, we have committed to integrate the Citebank functionality and content into BHL. In particular, this has dealt to support the implementation of Articles (Segments / Parts) that is now available in BHL. We are now working to import the Citebank content into BHL. This will include the links to externally hosted content, currently available in Citebank, from different repositories like Pensoft, Real Jardín Botanico, OTS, etc. (See list of Providers at http://citebank.org/about/content_providers).

The inclusion of these content would allow BHL to become more of a one-stop shop for biodiversity content, although it does restrict the kind of services that we could provide with that externally hosted content (mainly because we don't have the page scans in our BHL repository). As with Citebank, the content could be automatically harvested or manually incorporated into the BHL corpus.

The way to implement this third-party links functionality into the BHL model has been considered as part of the changes done for the previous release (when Articles were included), so adding these links shouldn't disturb the way the system is programmed right now. Nevertheless, it does incorporate a functionality that was not available before: when one of these links appears, the user would get the content from the external repository.

Here is an example we included in Beta just for illustrative purposes. This is not a "real" external link, as we may have this particular article in BHL, but we hope it helps to illustrate how the User Interface would look like:

http://beta.biodiversitylibrary.org/search?searchTerm=Discovery+of+Steninae+#/sections

Also, you can see how the summary page would look like for that same article here:

http://beta.biodiversitylibrary.org/part/41798#/summary.

Note that there is no link to the Book Viewer, as we don't have the scanned pages in BHL.

Now, the question has come up on what to do with segments that have no scanned pages for the article in BHL and no external link to content nor a landing page in another repository? One suggestion has been that these stubs (sometimes also called bibliographic records, references, citations, etc. ) that serve as a placeholder until the content is available either in BHL or in another repository, should not show up when the user is searching through the BHL query interface, but only when a program is querying through the API, to satisfy the need of the Global Names Project. Another suggestion, was to add a flag, both to the user interface and to the API, that allows the user or remote system to decide if they want to see results that have no content online. The question then is whether it's enabled by default (showing all results, even those that don't have content online) or disabled by default (showing only results that can immediately be read online in our repository). This particular topic of citations (ie. segments with no scanned pages and no external links to content or a landing page ) has been tabled in the current tech workplan for later consideration.

After talking with the Collections Committee, the Executive Committee and the Program Director, the plan to follow while including this content will be to get some of the current providers into the beta site to be able to explain better what the external links are and show how they will behave, by looking at some actual examples, and then decide from there the best way to enable this further.