BHL at launch in May, 2007 |
Like proud parents, we’re excited to announce that today BHL turns 5 years old! In 2007, the Biodiversity Heritage Library portal was launched with 306 titles, 3,236 volumes, and 1,271,664 pages of taxonomic literature, presented via a simple portal bathed in earthy tones. What began as a consortium of just 10 natural history and botanical libraries has today grown into a global project, with 14 US/UK consortium members as well as BHL nodes on every continent in the world except Antarctica.
Today, BHL includes:
- Over 55,000 titles, 105,000 volumes, and 38.6 million pages
- New and improved portal with updated colors, enhanced user-interface, and more Google-like, user-friendly searching
- New logo
- The ability to create your own PDF and download high-resolution images of BHL content
- The ability to generate bibliographies for specific species
- 13,048,166 BHL pages linking to EOL species pages, as well as 1,284,930 EOL species pages linking to BHL
- An advanced feedback system allowing staff to collect and promptly respond to user-submitted comments about content in BHL
- Scanning Request process to allow users to nominate material to be scanned for BHL
- Improved communication with users, including an active presence on our blog, Twitter, and Facebook
- Our spectacular Flickr account, featuring over 30,000 amazing natural history illustrations and projects in place to improve access to BHL images through the BHL portal
- Integration of our social media outreach into our portal, including the ability to tweet or post to Facebook directly within BHL
- Specialized collections of content within BHL, allowing users to explore our materials in a curated manner, including our extremely popular Charles Darwin’s Library collection
- The ability to add BHL titles directly to a Mendeley account
- The Biodiversity Heritage Library on iTunes U, allowing users to access select BHL content within iTunes and download to their iPod Touch, iPad, or iPhone
- The BHL public wiki – a one-stop shop for information about our project, FAQs, copyright policies, tutorials, and more
- New BHL Newsletter
- New BHL Quarterly Reports to keep users informed about project progress
- Active staff that regularly present about BHL at conferences and publish papers about our project
- BHL nodes in Australia, Europe, China, Egypt, and Brazil, with discussions underway to create a BHL for Sub-Saharan Africa
- Recognition as one of the top twelve free reference tools of 2011 by Library Journal
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