At the end of October I attended the Internet Archive Library Leaders Forum 2016. This was the 3rd time I’ve attended this meeting since 2009 and was by far the best one yet! The Forum coincided with IA’s 20th anniversary so there was a big push from IA to showcase their latest and greatest to celebrate their platinum year.

Some of the coolest new features highlighted:

• The ability to perform a full text search across all books and journal volumes in IA such as this full text search for “darwin.”
• New keyword search functionality for their Wayback Machine – just look at all these web pages about “biodiversity.”
• Additionally, Wikimedia Foundation is now using the Wayback Machine to fix over 1 million broken links in English Wikipedia! Plus Mozilla is experimenting with the Wayback Machine to develop a pilot that will eliminate the dreaded 404 pages that pop up when Internet links break. How useful!
• See more of their newest cool innovations

New GifCities searchable gif database

New Webverse 3D web visualization tool

The most successful aspect of the Forum was meeting with Internet Archive colleagues and partners face to face, many of which share similar digitization workflow and collection management challenges to BHL. In particular, colleagues from the Getty Research Institute, Georgetown University Law Library and HathiTrust are pursuing projects that could help inform BHL collection development for the future.

IA Founder Brewster Kahle delivers presentation

Interestingly, as the meeting attendees imagined the future of libraries over the next 10-20 years, I was pleased to hear that some of the challenges shared by both HathiTrust and IA are issues BHL has already considered and continues to explore as its collection and consortium grows:

• In what ways can we expand the scope of our content? Should we?
• What are the best strategies to ensure comprehensiveness of your collection?
• How can we encourage greater curation of our collection?
• What emphasis should be placed on the development of tools for de-duplication?

In case you missed our last post recapping the in-copyright content in BHL over 2015, we secured agreements with 23 licensors to provide 34 in-copyright titles for free and open access via our online collection.

BHL is thrilled that for the first few months of 2016, we have gotten permission to add 20 new in-copyright titles! Why such a sudden bounty? We have the work of the new IMLS-Funded Project: Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL) to thank for securing the large majority of these agreements and for performing the work of integrating this new content into our collection. Some of the titles below are from small natural history organizations that had previously digitized their content but lacked a way to have it represented in BHL. In the coming months, as larger content providers benefit from EABL assistance, the list will grow to include unique titles never before digitized.Our latests in-copyright titles are:

1. Arachnologische Mitteilungen from the Arachnologische Gesellschaft
2. Sage Notes from the Idaho Native Plant Society
3. Roosevelt Wild Life Station:
   1. Roosevelt Wild Life Annals
   2. Roosevelt Wild Life Bulletin
4. Long Island Botanical Society Newsletter from the Long Island Botanical Society
5. California Native Plant Society:
   1. The Bay Leaf from the East Bay Chapter
   2. Mimulus Memo from the Kern Chapter
   3. The Pipevine from the Mount Lassen Chapter
6. “A short Flora of Berwickshire” by M E Braithwaite (2014)
7. Golden Gate Audubon Society’s The Gull
8. Quaestiones Entomologicae of the University of Alberta
9. The Echinoderm Newsletter from the Smithsonian Institution
10. Wisconsin Entomological Society
    1. Wisconsin Entomological Society Newsletter
    2. “Checklist of Wisconsin Dragonflies” (1993)
    3. “Wisconsin Millipeds” (1995)
    4. “Checklist of Wisconsin Centipedes (Chilopoda)” (1997)
    5. “Checklist of Wisconsin Butterflies” (2002)

Linnaean Society of New York

1. Transactions of the Linnaean Society of New York
2. Abstract of the proceedings of the Linnaean Society of New York
3. Proceedings of the Linnaean Society of New York

As a reminder, our in-copyright titles are availble under a Creative Commons license as specified in the volume metadata. Would you like to learn more about reusing CC licensed content? Please see our Licensing & Copyright page as linked from the footer of our website:

What do the Scarborough District, tigers, Socieded Cientifica Argentina, Auckland Institute and Museum, birds and the Svjatoj Nos wetlands have in common?

Actually not much…

…except that they are the newest in-copyright additions to the BHL collection!

If you still think that BHL is strictly about legacy literature, think again. Although still a very small portion of our collection, in-copyright titles now total over 400 from 170 licensors. Please see our Permissions page to learn more about the in-copyright content in our collection.

Where possible, BHL acquires permission in the form of a signed license agreement from copyright holders to digitize post-1922 publications. These publications are available for open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. Users are welcome to reuse the in-copyright content in BHL so long as they adhere to the terms of the CC license, meaning:

• you attribute the content to the copyright holder,
• use the content for non-commercial purposes such as educational or personal use
• share the content under the same license (CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Our latest (bio)diverse mix of titles hails from all over the world:

The Natural History of the Scarborough District
Since 1889, the Scarborough Field Naturalists’ Society has encouraged the organization of “amateur naturalists’ with interests throughout the spectrum of natural history.” BHL is pleased to include this publication in our collection as we feel we are the perfect place for these types of smaller scholarly society publications.

Tracking tigers : a review of the status of tiger, Asian elephant, gaur, and banteng in Vietnam, Lao, Cambodia, and Yunnan (China), with recommendations for future conservation action by Will Duckworth and Simon Hedges (1998)
In 1998 the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Indochina programme commissioned a report on the status of large mammals. “It was an incredible piece of work and represents an expertly pieced together compilation of data and information from every source possible” explains Michael Baltzer, Director of the WWF Tigers Alive Initiative. As the first in-copyright WWF publication to become a part of the BHL collection, we hope this is a good sign for additional WWF publications to come.

Anales de la Sociedad Cientifica Argentina
A pioneering institution for scientific study in Argentina since 1872, the Sociedad Cientifica Argentina has published its Anales for over 130 years. BHL is thrilled to be able to provide this complete publication through the present day. Digitization of the Anales is underway and should be available shortly.

Bulletin of the Auckland Institute and Museum and Poirieria
The Auckland Museum Institute dates back to 1867 when it assumed the management of the Auckland Museum and became the regional representative of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Its Bulletin covers a spectrum of topics related to natural and human history. The Auckland Shell Club was formed in 1931 as a section of the Auckland Museum Institute, dedicated to “all things molluscan, ie: shell collecting (recent and fossil), conchology and malacology (study of shells and shellfish), and molluscan ecology and conservation.” These publications will be available in BHL soon.

Ornithological Society of Turkey Bird reports and Ornithological Society of Turkey Bulletins 
In 1978, the Ornithological Society of the Middle East (OSME) formed as a successor to the Ornithological Society of Turkey. Its purpose is to promote research and address conservation issues for birds in the region between, “between Europe, China and the Horn of Africa on two major migration flyways crossing Central Asia’s wind-swept steppes, the Caucasus’s towering mountains, Arabia’s wide arid deserts and the tropical seas of the Indian Ocean.” Previously, the OSME gave permission for BHL to include Sandgrouse and its Bulletin in our collection. It has now added 2 more titles, published under its former name. Please stay tuned for digital copies of the Bird reports and Bulletins to appear in the coming weeks.

Ecology of the Svjatoj Nos wetlands, Lake Baikal by J. Mlíkovský & P. Stýblo (eds.)

These stunning wetlands are located on the Kola Peninsula along one of the most northeastern coasts in Russia. BHL is pleased to make this work available in our collection soon.

Digitization is in progress for these titles and you can see them appearing via our recent additions list.

Want to see more in-copyright content in BHL? Let us know what you’d like to see!

Did you know that there is modern literature in our collection?

We have permission with over 165 licensors to provide nearly 400 in-copyright titles for free and open access under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. In other words, we have contemporary titles in our collection that you are free to use so long as you attribute the content to the copyright holder, use the content for educational or personal use only (commercial use is NOT allowed) and share the content under the same license (CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0). You can even create derivatives of the content for reuse so long as you adhere to the terms of the license.

BHL is pleased to announce the recent acquisition of 4 new in-copyright titles that we are in the process of adding to our collection:

The San Diego Shell Club [http://www.sandiegoshellclub.com/]
Since 1961, the San Diego Shell Club has been promoting research and appreciation of Mollusca through “lectures, club meetings and field trips,” as well as through their peer-reviewed publication, The Festivus. The Club has relationships with natural history museums in southern California including the San Diego Natural History Museum, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles and the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.

• BHL is looking forward to providing back-issues of The Festivus through 2013 in our collection soon. Please monitor our recent additions page to track its progress. The San Diego Shell Club offers copies of their current volume for a very affordable fee via their website.

California Botanical Society [http://calbotsoc.org/madrono/]
Dedicated to the advancement of Western American botany, the California Botanical Society has been operating since 1913. Through its peer-reviewed publication, annual banquet, research support, graduate student support and community outreach it continues to play a major role in promoting scientific study and raising awareness about this important niche area of botany.

• Digitization of Madroño; a West American journal of botany is actively in progress with over 50 volumes and counting. The California Botanical Society agreed to provide in-copyright volumes for the BHL collection under a 3 year “moving wall” or embargo meaning that for 2015 we will complete digitization up through the 2012 volume. Every year thereafter, we will digitize one more volume such that the 2013 volume will be available in 2016 and so on.

Work in progress…and if you are wondering why the current series of volumes for this title is out of sequence, it is because we are still in the process of digitizing the title, modifying the metadata, and ensuring we have all volumes present and accounted for. Sequencing volumes in their proper order takes manual curation of the items in our collection. Thanks, in advance, for your patience. Notice other titles with volumes out of order? Please let us know and thanks! We’ll get to it when we can.

The Royal Society of Queensland [http://www.royalsocietyqld.org/index.htm] began with the publication of its first Proceedings in 1884 as a successor to the Philosophical Society of Queensland. Over 150 years later, the Society is not only the oldest scientific institution in Queensland but is still producing its Proceedings on an annual basis. Entirely run by volunteers, the Society “seeks to increase awareness of the sciences in Queensland” by promoting “original research and the application of scientific method and knowledge to policy-making and decision-making.”

• Proceedings of the Royal Society of Queensland. BHL digitized early volumes of the Society’s publication in 2009 and is in the process of digitizing through 1955. Please stay tuned for more volumes to appear in the coming weeks.
• The earliest volumes of the Society were published as the Transactions of the Philosophical Society of Queensland vol.1 (1859) to vol.3 (1872) and will be digitized to BHL as well. These early volumes are proving tricky to track down within our BHL consortium partner holdings but where there’s a will, there’s a way…

Would you like to contribute any in-copyright content to the BHL? If we hold the content in one of our partner libraries we would be happy to digitize it under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and make it available via our website. Please see our Permissions page for more information and contact us [http://biodiversitylibrary.org/contact].