News and Information
Improved Searching Capabilities!
We have been hard at work extending BNA's searching capabilities, and are pleased to introduce the first robust change to the Search feature in BNA v. 2.0. It is now possible to search by common/scientific name, order, family, genus, and keyword/keyword string. The new search looks for the information you enter into the search field in all of the following places: article titles, article content, captions or extended captions in a photo, figure or data table. The search results yield in categorical pull-down menus that include four classes of results: species accounts, articles, photos/figures/maps and lastly, data tables & appendices. The results yield in alphabetical order for each field.Tips on Enhancing and Narrowing Search Results
The default behavior for anything entered in the search box is to look for all of the words in the box that can be found in either a species account article, caption or description field. For example, if you were to enter the words: lazuli bunting eggs into the search box, the search would look for any place in BNA where those words appear in the same space, and do not yield results of those words next to one another. If you wanted to perform a search that found words in sequence together, you would need to put them between quotation marks, e.g. "threat display" yields you the result of 140 articles that mention these words in sequence, and 15 results of Photos, Images and Maps that have this term in the caption or description fields. Now say that you wanted to narrow this result to only find the threat displays of plovers. If you were to enter "threat display" plover into the search bar, you have narrowed the results to 5 articles and 1 Photo, Image and Map. In all the examples above the search terms will be highlighted on the page you navigate to.Wild-card Searches
You can perform wild-card searches with the BNA search engine, which can be done by placing an asterisk after the beginning of your search term. For example, if you wanted to see a list of all hummingbird species, you could either type the word "hummingbird" into the Search field or you could type in hum* to retrieve all the species with "hum" in their Common Name. You can also tailor the wildcard search for keywords or keyword strings.What's New in the New BNA
Welcome to The Birds of North America Online version 2.0! The new BNA has many improvements and changes within it that will enhance and improve your experience with our resource, as well as enable us to deliver newly revised and fresh material to you much more quickly. A brief overview of some changes in the new BNA include:- Search capability from any and every page within the site, allowing you to navigate from species to species more effectively than in the old BNA.
- Species articles now include figures from the gallery alongside their respective articles (i.e. Distribution maps in the "Distribution" article, Sonographs of calls in the "Sounds" section, etc), and we are in the process of adding photos to relevant articles as well.
- Quick access to specific galleries for multimedia are underneath the Multimedia tab for Photos, Figures, Audio, Video and Data Tables/Appendices.
- Expanded captions and annotations for photos, audio and video.
Along with the new BNA there are a few new issues that we have yet
to resolve. Please visit our Known Issues
section of our FAQ sheet to read about these known issues, and our plan
for addressing them.
In the coming months, we are expecting to add a considerable amount
of new material to BNA, including new species revisions, hundreds of
new photos and new figures, audio and video. Check back often to see
what's new in the new BNA!
Information for Contributors
If you are a current or prospective BNA author and need to find information about contributing or revising an account in BNA, please read BNA editor Alan Poole's Letter to the Authors. In it you will find our most pressing requests, updates on research, production and workflow, as well as guidelines for contributing.
If you are interested in contributing photographs or other rich media to BNA, please read about photographic contributions here.
