Friday, March 20, 2026

Integrating inventaire.io with the Library of Identification Resources

One of the main features of the Library of Identification Resources (LoIR)[1][2], is its search engine[3]. It finds applicable taxonomic resources (in the form of books, websites, etc.) for an observation of an organism (consisting of a location and a taxonomic group), and ranks those resources on relevance, usability, and recency. The second factor, usability, is determined from the level of detail of the resource, as well as its accessibility. Resources that are freely available online score higher, so people can more easily find a resource that they can actually use, instead of being directed to but an expensive book.

However, maybe you already own that book, in which case it is already accessible. In that case, you would want to be able to specify which books you own so that the search engine can account for that. Luckily, there happens to be a open-data platform to do that: inventaire.io [4]. If you have a public account on inventaire.io, you can now connect this to LoIR.

If you go to the new “Settings” page [A], you can click the button “Add inventaire.io shelf” [B].

Page titled "User settings" with a section "Libraries" with a button "Add inventaire.io shelf" and a table containing columns "ID", "Title", "Location", "Library" and "Comment". In the header in the top right, a link "Settings" is labelled "A"; the add button is labelled "B".

Here, after entering your username, you can select a shelf.

Same page as the previous image, now with an overlaying modal dialog with a input named "Username" and a list of shelves with "Add" buttons.

LoIR will automatically match books based on ISBNs and other identifiers. If a match is incorrect, or if it fails to find a match, you can add it manually.

Bottom of the same table as in the first image. In the leftmost "ID" column, there are "Edit" buttons. Several items have a warning "Unknown holding" highlighted in red in place of the title.

Lastly, if there is a match, it will show up on the pages of the individual records as well as in the search results, where it also affects the ranking.

Two screenshots: the detailed page of individual resources where the "Libraries" field in the "Access" section is highlighted in a red rectangle; and a search results page where a URL underneath a search result is highlighted in a red rectangle.

References

  1. Willighagen L. G., Jongejans E. (2025). Library of Identification Resources: a FAIR overview of taxonomic keys. Biodiversity Data Journal 13: e161726. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.13.e161726
  2. Willighagen, L. G. (2022-08-06). Library of Identification Resources. Syntaxus Baccata [blog]. https://doi.org/10.59350/h8qka-z4a05
  3. Willighagen, L. G. (2025-10-21). Updates to taxonomic coverage and search result scoring. Syntaxus Baccata [blog]. https://doi.org/10.59350/c87y0-72m49
  4. Lathuilière, M. (2015-02-09). Mapping resources using open knowledge: starting with books! InventaireWiki [blog]. https://wiki.inventaire.io/wiki/Mapping_resources_using_open_knowledge:_starting_with_books!
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