The Biodiversity Heritage Library Adds Museum für Naturkunde Berlin as a New Member

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is pleased to welcome the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN) as a new Member. MfN is the first German museum to join the Biodiversity Heritage Library as a Member.

The Museum für Naturkunde Berlin has been a part of the BHL global family for nearly a decade through BHL Europe. Launched in 2009 and coordinated by MfN, the three-year BHL Europe project aimed to improve the interoperability of European biodiversity digital libraries and bring together the digitization activities of institutions across the EU.

“The Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and BHL have been working together for many years towards a shared vision of global open access to worldwide biodiversity collections,” affirms BHL Program Director Martin R. Kalfatovic. “We are excited to strengthen our collaborative efforts through membership and look forward to working with our MfN colleagues to realize our shared vision, expand our international research impact, and pursue further partnerships within Germany and across Europe.”

As a BHL Member, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin will provide technical, digitization, and data management expertise and contribute rare and unique materials from its significant collections. The Museum will also explore opportunities to facilitate participation and contributions from other German organizations and societies. Ongoing participation in the Biodiversity Heritage Library will allow MfN to further its commitment to making biodiversity literature as freely and openly available as possible.

“We believe that the library collections of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin are of high value for both the scientific community as well as other users like citizen scientists and the general public,” asserts Dr. Jana Hoffmann, Head of the Digital World and Information Science programme at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. “BHL supports our efforts in the science programme Digital World and Information Science to open our library physically and digitally, thus positioning the museum as a global and active player ‘For Nature.’”

About the Biodiversity Heritage Library

BHL is a consortium of major natural history, botanical and research libraries that seek to contribute to the global “biodiversity commons” by digitizing and providing free and open access to biodiversity literature and archives from across the globe. For more information, visit the Biodiversity Heritage Library website: www.biodiversitylibrary.org.

About Museum für Naturkunde Berlin

The Museum für Naturkunde – Leibniz-Institut für Evolutions- und Biodiversitätsforschung (MfN) in Berlin is an integrative research museum in the Leibniz Association, a union of non-university German research institutions dedicated to addressing scientific issues of societal importance. Consisting of over 30 million specimens, the Museum’s collections constitute a research infrastructure of worldwide importance. The MfN Library holds 374,000 items representing multidisciplinary fields within the natural sciences and the history of science. With the credo “Für Natur” (“For Nature”) driving all of its work, MfN is dedicated to tackling the major biodiversity and environmental challenges of the 21st century through its operations, research projects, exhibitions, and targeted collaborative efforts.