New funding. New partners. New projects. See what's new at the Biodiversity Heritage Library!
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 Partners
The Internet Archive, a non-profit institution based in San Francisco and long-time BHL partner in digitization efforts, and the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, one of the world's premier natural history museums, based in Leiden, The Netherlands, have joined the Biodiversity Heritage Library as Affiliates. The BHL consortium now consists of ten Affiliates and fifteen Members.
Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature Project
The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has funded the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature project to help libraries, museums, and natural history societies contribute content to BHL and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). Project deliverables include 100 new and first time content providers to both BHL and DPLA, the addition of up to 50 titles that are still in copyright to BHL, and the development of processes that will ensure long-term contributions to DPLA. The project was one of nine National Digital Platform Projects funded in 2015 as part of the National Leadership Grants for Libraries program.
In February, the BHL Secretariat hosted a workshop for the Expanding Access team at the Smithsonian Libraries. The workshop provided an intense overview of the methodologies for partnering with institutions not currently participating in BHL.
The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has selected the "Biodiversity Heritage Library Field Notes Project" for a 2015 Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives award. The award will support work at participating institutions to digitize, assign metadata to, and publish field notes online through BHL and Internet Archive.
Color Our Collections, which invited users to download images from library and cultural institution collections, color them, and share their colored copies on social media using the hashtag #ColorOurCollections. Over 200 institutions worldwide participated in the event, which was led by The New York Academy of Medicine. BHL content included a Flickr collection with over 1,000 black and white images, a Pinterest collection with individual coloring pages created from BHL images, and a coloring book. See our synopsis on Storify.
Providing researchers with free access to biodiversity knowledge is critical to saving life on Earth. Help us accomplish this goal by donating to BHL today!
