All posts by Bianca Crowley

For this week’s BHL Book of the Week, I’d like to highlight a book that is all about one of my favorite plant species, Humulus lupulus, better known as hops.

As Collections Coordinator for the Biodiversity Heritage Library, I am the point person for all things collections related. I lead and organize the work of the BHL Collections Committee, process all scanning requests, manage the acquisition of new materials and handle our permissions agreement workflow.

We are thrilled to announce that selected collections of BHL content are now available on the new iTunes U!

We first launched our article download functionality back in January of 2009, giving users the ability to create their own PDF of selected pages from an item in BHL. Since that time, over 79,000 articles have been created by our users. That’s an average of 80 articles created each day (thanks WolframAlpha.com)! Clearly the ability to create your own PDF of selected pages, rather than download the entire book or volume, is a useful service; something we have been working on to make improvements whenever possible.

BHL has made some big changes today. Our site now features a new logo, a new “Donate” button and enhanced social media functionality that significantly improves the way you can interact with and share BHL content.

BHL has a new look and improved functionality. As a result of user feedback received from the BHL survey and through our feedback form we have improved the BHL interface. Gone are the days of the subject keyword tag-cloud on the BHL homepage. Today, the new interface provides a variety of tabs to facilitate simple or advanced search strategies.

In November 2009, the BHL started ingesting biodiversity related content from the Internet Archive. Since then, the BHL collection has grown significantly. Each week, the BHL brings in new content from the Internet Archive based on a criteria of selected Library of Congress Subject Headings and call numbers, with the aim of bringing in content related to the literature of biological diversity.