Commons talk:Biodiversity Heritage Library

Comment

A comment on the goal to lobby BHL to encourage contributors to release content more openly. The library partners of BHL are all providing open access content. For post-1923 materials, we have worked directly with the publishers of this material. Because of the need to scale the project, rather than having individually negotiated agreements with these copyright holders, we needed an agreement that would provide maximum freedom without a high overhead in terms of negotiation. As a side note, the best illustrations are going to come from the pre-20th century works.

Thanks for setting up this page! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kalfatovic (talk • contribs) 19 novembre 2011 16:02 (UTC)

Martin: Thanks for your feedback! I wrote up the section on copyright only to point out that not all BHL images can be brought into the Commons just yet. The main thing I want to work on right now is to categorize the BHL content already in the Commons, and to tag it with BHL information and links to that BHL can benefit from the Commons hosting their content; actually lobbying anyone (or even being officially involved with the BHL at all!) is probably a ways away for now. Chris Freeland pointed out in the technical meeting on Tuesday that earlier experiments with crowdsourcing metadata for BHL didn't work out; my plan here is to demonstrate that the Commons and Wikipedia could work for disseminating and tagging BHL images, but I wouldn't want BHL to commit resources until we can prove it :) -- Gaurav (talk) 21:51, 19 November 2011 (UTC)

Help needed ?

I heard about the project through Twitter and I’d be glad to help. Let me know if you need anything! Jean-Fred (talk) 20:24, 19 November 2011 (UTC)

Jean-Fred: Cool! I created this page mainly as a TODO list of things that I'd like to do to start bringing BHL-Flickr-Wikipedia closer together. It's just me for now, so be bold and jump in on any of the tasks if you can! Otherwise, moral support and Twitter publicity would be much appreciated too :) -- Gaurav (talk) 21:51, 19 November 2011 (UTC)

Okay! :-) Jean-Fred (talk) 22:37, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

Source template

Quicky drafted {{Biodiversity Heritage Library}}. Let me know what you think! Jean-Fred (talk) 22:37, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

Yay! That is awesome! This is also the first time I've seen a multilingual template in action, they're really impressive! -- Gaurav (talk) 09:41, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

Item to link

I think it'd be handy to link to both the BHL item (e.g. http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/title/43777) as well as the BHL page (e.g. http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/30081299), although of course some uploads are going to be sections of books (e.g. File:Species_Plantarum,_Tomus_1_-_pp._281–560.djvu), and so will only have a BHL item URL. I'm wondering if it makes more sense to link to the entire URL, or for the editor to specify just the item and page numbers, if present (e.g. {{Biodiversity Heritage Library|title=43777|page=30081299}}). I'll drop BHL an e-mail tomorrow and check.

On second thoughts, I think the URL will be much easier to explain to editors (instead of "find the page you want, look for the URL on the left hand side, then copy just the number out of the end ..."). If the URL links back to the page, then we're done :). No e-mail to BHL then! -- Gaurav (talk) 10:09, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

To clarify, I mean a single URL: it'll be up to the editors to choose whether they want a page or item URL.  Done -- Gaurav (talk) 23:50, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

Hmm... Usually we prefer whatever id we can get. It makes it easier to fix stuff if external URLs change. Maybe a bit more difficult for the user, but we do manage it for {{ID-USMil}} for example...

I guess it would be worth investigating. Jean-Fred (talk) 00:49, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Nice image

Oh, and we should definitely have a pretty image beside the text! I don't think we'll get permission to import the BHL logos into the Commons, but check out the style guide on that page: if we use a pretty illustration (such as File:Cephalopterus_glabricollisPZS1850P20B.jpg, File:Sepp-Surinaamsche_vlinders_-_pl_005_plate_Dryas_julia.jpg or File:Sepp-Surinaamsche_vlinders_-_pl_148_plate_Papilio_androgeus.jpg) and then use the official BHL colours for the top of this template, I think that'll look really good for now.

 Done What do you think, Jean-Fred? If you like, could you please translate the French template to the same layout?-- Gaurav (talk) 23:50, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

Nice pic. Risized it a bit to keep a thin template. Updated french template with an alternative feel; what do you think? Jean-Fred (talk) 00:49, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure what alternative feel you mean; both the EN and FR versions look great! Especially resizing the image works really well. -- Gaurav (talk) 02:20, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Sorry for the somewhat incoherent note! It's 2:30am where I am :). I will try to make more sense tomorrow! -- Gaurav (talk) 09:41, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

A thought: those links to the BHL item/BHL page should probably be in the {{Information}} template, whose 'source' parameter would then be set to {{Biodiversity Heritage Library}}. Does that make sense? In that case, does it make sense to eventually create an {{Information BHL}} template, which would have BHL-specific fields (including book title, publication information, item and page URLs, and all the other information BHL provides). -- Gaurav (talk) 10:09, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, they are fine in the source field.

Dedicated template are built if really, really needed and if we really, really cannot make it with either one of the triumvirate {{Information}}, {{Artwork}} & {{Book}}. Do you think we might need more than any of these three can offer?

Jean-Fred (talk) 00:49, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

I'm thinking about page-scan specific stuff, like "page number(s)", "Book/journal extracted from", "Illustrator", etc. But I think {{Information}} is going to be perfectly fine for now. -- Gaurav (talk) 02:20, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Flickr to Commons tool

I just had a go at transferring a set of images from BHL flickr set to commons using the Flickr to Commons tool on wmflabs, you can add the {{Biodiversity Heritage Library}} template to the add to all descriptions field and it works, useful but not sure if this is known already?

Cheers

--Mrjohncummings (talk) 13:21, 22 July 2013 (UTC)