To kick off our Open Access Week celebrations, I would like to highlight one of my favorite digital archive projects: The Biodiversity Heritage Library. Why do I love the BHL? It’s focused, creative, and pragmatic, as you’ll see in this week’s Tutorial Tuesday.

Our tutorial this week comes in the form of an article published by the BHL in the code4lib journal last year: Geocoding LCSH in the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Reusing metadata generated through years of cataloging practice is a natural and pragmatic way of leveraging an institution?s investment in describing its resources. Unfortunately, many digitization projects disassociate metadata about the original object from the metadata about its digital surrogate when publishing that surrogate online.

The article describes in detail how the BHL extracts geographic subdivisions from the MARC records of books they have digitized and submits those subdivisions to the Google Maps API. It’s search visualization at its best – simple, intuitive, and relevant to the information needs of the users.

The BHL is just one of many interesting Open Access projects. Check out the Open Access Directory hosted by Simmons for more links!