NEWS & NOTES
A quarterly newsletter from the Biodiversity Heritage Library
FALL 2015

Inspiring Discovery through Free Access to Biodiversity Knowledge
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) improves research methodology by collaboratively making biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community.

New Feature! Add Comments to BHL Books
Add Comments to books in BHL.
You can now add comments to books in BHL!
This month, as part of the Mining Biodiversity project, we added the ability to add comments to books in BHL. This new feature, powered by the social commenting tool Disqus, allows users to easily share discoveries while reading BHL books, highlight interesting content, post expertise for others to see, engage in conversations about BHL books from directly within BHL, and easily discover all of the great posts from fellow biodiversity-enthusiasts. We hope that this tool will provide another way for users to engage with our collections and network with others in the BHL community. Learn more.
Celebrating Fossils for National Fossil Day
Fossil Week.
BHL celebrated National Fossil Day (14 October) this year with the week-long social media event Fossil Stories, which explored the world of fossils, the history of paleontology, and the men, women, and publications that shaped our knowledge about life preserved in rocks. Content included a series of blog posts, tweets, and Facebook posts, and hundreds of fabulous historic fossil illustrations on Flickr and Pinterest, as well as a collection of seminal books in the history of paleontology in the BHL Fossil Stories collection. The highlights of the campaign were a series of live webcasts at three of our participating partner institutions (The Field Museum, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and the Natural History Museum, Los Angeles County), as well as a citizen science challenge in partnership with The Field Book Project, the Smithsonian Transcription Center, and the Smithsonian Institution Archives. See the content from the campaign compiled together in our Storify. Learn more in our campaign report.

Workshop Supports Growth of BHL Africa

2015 BHL Africa Workshop attendees.
2015 BHL Africa Workshop attendees.
From 24-26 September, 2015, fifteen representatives from eleven institutions throughout South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda attended a BHL Africa training workshop at the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi. The workshop was an opportunity to provide training and help build capacity amongst the current signatories of the BHL Africa MOU. The workshop was funded as part of the 2015 JRS Biodiversity Foundation grant, awarded to the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI), to facilitate the growth of BHL Africa. Learn more.
BHL Exhibit at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Celebrating the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Supporting Scientists Worldwide
"Celebrating the Biodiversity Heritage Library: Supporting Scientists Worldwide" exhibit at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
On 1 September, 2015, the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign unveiled an exhibit about BHL at the Main Library Marshall Gallery entitled: "Celebrating the Biodiversity Heritage Library: Supporting Scientists Worldwide." This free exhibit highlighted contributed materials from the University as well as the BHL collection itself and drew attention to Library digitization efforts and historic scientific materials on campus. The exhibit ran through 30 September, 2015. The University has been a BHL Member since 2014 and has contributed over 1.2 million pages from over 4,500 volumes to BHL to date. Learn more.
Get Involved with BHL!

There are many ways to get involved in BHL, from becoming a Member or Affiliate and contributing content to donating to support BHL or participating in one of our many citizen science activities. Currently, BHL's volunteer opportunities include Flickr image tagging, transcribing field books as part of The Field Book Project, correcting OCR via our two crowdsourcing games, or describing illustrations via Science Gossip on Zooniverse. Learn more about how you can get involved today!

BHL at Conferences

BHL has participated in a variety of international biodiversity and digital library conferences recently. Explore them today: