Cornell University’s Albert R. Mann Library joins BHL!

The Biodiversity Heritage Library welcomes the Albert R. Mann Library of Cornell University to our growing consortium. The Mann Library brings with it a fantastic team of librarians to the BHL workforce, as well as outstanding collections in the fields of agriculture, human ecology and life sciences. Next to Harvard University’s, the Ernst Mayr Museum of Comparative Zoology Library and the Botany Libraries, the Cornell University is now the second academic institution to join the BHL.

As reported at Cornell:

Mann Library Director, Mary Ochs explains, “our partnership with BHL will significantly increase the visibility and accessibility of Mann’s collections for a global community of researchers. I’m really pleased that this partnership will in turn help connect Cornell scholars with the amazing body of biodiversity-related literature available at all the remarkable institutions that make up the BHL consortium.”

The next focus of Mann’s participation will be the digitization of Cornell’s entomology collection, which is one of the largest and finest in the world. Mann has already digitized more than 190 titles from the Library’s special collections of rare entomology works — including beautifully illustrated gems such as Dru Drury’s 18^th-century “Illustrations of Natural History” and Jacob Hübner’s late 19^th-century “Geschichte Europäischer Schmetterlinge” — which will soon be added to the BHL site and will fill out a major area in BHL’s wide-ranging coverage universe of biodiversity literature.

A contributor to our scanning partner the Internet Archive, biodiversity related materials from the Cornell University Library have been integrated into the BHL collection. Nearly 4,000 agriculture and life sciences titles were added to BHL in early January, helping us surpass a major milestone:

The BHL collection now has over 100,000 volumes, 50,000 titles and over 37 million pages! Many thanks to Cornell University Library for bumping us above and beyond a major digitization goal. Of course, the BHL collection could not be where it is today without the hard work and dedication of its consortium members which have been digitizing volumes since 2007. Back then we had just over a mere 3200 volumes. It is amazing to look back and see how far the collection and the project have come in 5 years. Now a consortium of 14 libraries in the United States and the United Kingdom, the BHL is growing globally to include partners in Australia, Brazil, China, Egypt, and across Europe. Here’s to more improvements to the BHL portal, more partnerships, and more content over the next 5 years (and many more).