What is happening to the Biodiversity Heritage Library collection?

We have received multiple complaints about the duplicate records included in the Biodiversity Heritage Library collection and also about the titles that seem to be duplicates, but are, in fact, separate records published by different publishers. 

We have contacted provider and asked to review the title list they are sending to us. As a result, they have acknowledged that there is some amount of duplications in the list and they will be performing a cleanup.

We are also working with the provider on finding a way to differentiate between the multiple records with identical titles and publication dates that were published by different publishers. Once it is finalized, we will update this article with more details. 

Unfortunately, after several months of email exchanges, provider has decided that they do not have resources to perform the cleanup and without this cleanup a development we were planning to add to this title list's preprocessing will only yield a very small number of corrections which makes it irrelevant. 

We are discussing possible alternatives, including indexing of the BHL metadata in Central Discovery Index and changing this collection to a database in the knowldgebases. 

We will provide an update once we have a working plan for this content. 

• Article last edited: 26-SEP-2023