All posts by Carolyn Sheffield

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is pleased to announce that nine of the Smithsonian field books that were cataloged and imaged as part of the Field Book Project are now available through the BHL portal! With over 43 million pages of the published biodiversity literature, BHL has greatly improved the efficiency of access to the published literature–much of which was previously available in limited physical copies in but a few select libraries in the developed world.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library, headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries, welcomes the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a new member. The 16th member of the BHL consortium, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will help identify and digitize historical science literature from its collections and add these to the BHL’s online holdings, where all materials may be accessed free by the public. “The Biodiversity Heritage Library is the preeminent global repository for historic science literature,” said Martin Kalfatovic, BHL program director and associate director for digital services at the Smithsonian Libraries.

As part of our regular BHL & Our Users series, Connie Rinaldo (MCZ Librarian and BHL Executive Committee Member) recently caught up with Cam Webb, a Senior Research Scientist at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University.  We were very pleased to hear about how he has been exploring BHL and what he discovered.

The last several months have been an intense and exciting period of growth and expansion for BHL. Not only has the steady growth of collections continued but BHL as an organization has been growing as well. In the first two quarters of fiscal year 2014, three new Members and one new Affiliate joined BHL-Central. BHL’s global presence is expanding as well with one of those new Members also participating as a global node. To learn more about each of the new BHL Members and Affiliate and what BHL has been up to across the globe, check out BHL’s latest newsletter and quarterly report.

BHL is honored to learn that we’ve been nominated for a Zedler Award by Wikimedia Deutschland.  This award acknowledges contributions of individuals, groups or projects who have made contributions to free and open knowledge.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries, welcomes Washington University Libraries (St. Louis, Missouri) as a new member. The 14th member of the BHL consortium, Washington University Libraries will help identify and digitize historical science literature from its collections and add these to the BHL’s online holdings, where all materials may be accessed free by the public. Founded in 1853, Washington University in St. Louis is a medium-sized independent research institution widely recognized for its teaching, research, patient care and service to society.

In early February, the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) hosted the EOL-BHL Research Sprint. NESCent, based in Durham, NC, is a non-profit science center supporting research in the evolutionary sciences. NESCent emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach to research, and so the idea behind the Sprint was to put together teams of programmers and life scientists to expose each other to questions and ways of thinking that they might not necessarily consider in their normal work.