Finding scientific articles in a large digital archive: BioStor and the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Yesterday I uploaded a manuscript to Nature Precedings that describes the inner workings of BioStor. The title is "Finding scientific articles in a large digital archive: BioStor and the Biodiversity Heritage Library", and you can grab it here: hdl:10101/npre.2010.4928.1.

Manuscripts describing databases are usually pretty turgid affairs, and this isn't an exception, despite my attempts to spice it up with the tale of Leviathan, oops, Livyatan (see doi:10.1038/nature09381 and Wikipedia). Plus, I can't escape the thought that BioStor would have been a lot more fun to write if I'd used a key-value database like CouchDB. I fear this is often the way of things. By the time it comes to writing something up, you realise that if you could start over you'd do it rather differently.