All posts in BHL News

In the face of climate change and environmental challenges, understanding and documenting Earth’s biodiversity is essential. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) serves as a global repository for biodiversity data, playing a pivotal role in this critical mission of safeguarding our planet’s biodiversity. Species occurrence data sourced from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) provides insights into species distributions, behaviors, and interactions much deeper into time, offering key species baseline data required to effectively address the climate crisis. Without accurate and comprehensive data in GBIF, our collective ability to track environmental changes and make informed decisions is severely hampered.

As a GBIF participant node, BHL is committed to sharing biodiversity data openly, adhering to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics) data principles, and collaborating with a global network of biodiversity organizations to bolster and build capacity to strengthen the biodiversity information infrastructure. To honor our commitments, technical staff from BHL are working to establish a scalable data pipeline of occurrence data currently trapped in archival field notes, journals, letters, correspondence, and other primary source materials. The journey has been an arduous one due to poor OCR (optical character recognition) data quality for BHL’s sub-corpus of handwritten materials.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is pleased to welcome two new Affiliates in 2023: Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, and Meise Botanic Garden in Meise, Belgium. The BHL Consortium now includes 19 Members and 23 Affiliates.

The planet is at a critical juncture, where urgent action is required to combat climate change, biodiversity loss, and secure a sustainable future for our planet. With the release of the recent BHL Wikimedia white paper entitled Unifying Biodiversity Knowledge to Support Life on a Sustainable Planet, the Biodiversity Heritage Library Secretariat hopes that an expanded data vision for the BHL community presents new opportunities to take bold steps forward into Wikimedia projects and the emergent semantic web. The white paper sheds light on BHL’s crucial role as a member of the biodiversity informatics community and reveals a series of key use cases and big data challenges that, if addressed, could be opportunities to enhance global biodiversity data infrastructure.

Our latest bi-annual newsletter is now available! From BHL Day 2023 in Paris to releasing the new Ukrainian Українська Collection, don’t miss the latest news from the BHL community.

Originally scheduled for 2020, the BHL Annual Meeting finally made it to Paris after two years of virtual meetings and a break to hold the 2022 BHL Annual Meeting in conjunction with the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) and the Natural Sciences Collections Society (NatSCA) meetings in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The host for the 2023 meeting was the library of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle (MNHN), led by Alice Lemaire, Clément Oury, and Gildas Illien. The meeting took place 17-21 April 2023 and included BHL business meetings, tours of library and museum sites, and a BHL symposium titled “Fostering Data Driven Natural Science through Open Digital Libraries”. In total, the meeting gathered 38 attendees (both in-person and virtually) from 22 BHL partners from around the world.

Through ongoing collaborative collection building and digitization, the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Library (NAL) is partnering with the Biodiversity Heritage Library to support biodiversity and scientific research in Ukraine with the release of the Ukrainian Українська Collection. BHL and NAL stand with the people of Ukraine and echo the support of its consortium partner institutions in their condemnation of the Russian Federation’s invasion.

The threat to Ukraine’s cultural heritage materials remains substantial during the wartime humanitarian crisis. Many libraries and cultural heritage institutions throughout Ukraine have been severely damaged or destroyed, resulting in the permanent loss of culturally and scientifically significant content. Through the digitization of historic materials related to biodiversity research in Ukraine, this project will help support Ukraine’s scientific community by providing access to these important resources.

In the Spring of 2022, the BHL Cataloging and Metadata Committee investigated the possibility of harvesting persistent identifiers (PIDs) from Wikidata as part of the group’s longstanding project to disambiguate and deduplicate author records in the BHL database. The motivation behind this one-time experimental data harvest was to see if BHL could:

1. Enhance BHL author records with additional PID data points;
2. Improve the committee’s ability to disambiguate author names in the BHL database; and
3. Respond to an outstanding user request from two of Wikimedia’s super star editors, Siobhan Leachman and Andy Mabbett, to expose BHL’s author data on BHL and include hyperlinks to other authoritative knowledge bases on the web.

In particular, Wikimedians wanted to see the Wikidata Q identifier exposed, providing a link to the corresponding creator item record in Wikidata.

There are multiple motivations for undertaking this work. By adding the BHL Creator ID to the corresponding Wikidata item, Wikidata editors help link BHL to the richer biographical data about that person held in Wikidata. The Wikidata item for a person may contain links to their Wikipedia page or to images of the person held in the image repository Wikimedia Commons. Wikidata items also act as identifier hubs and contain links to other databases and identifiers.

By adding the BHL Creator ID to this list of identifiers, the Wikidata editor is linking the content held in BHL to the content held in multiple other datasets and repositories.

These extra author data points provide Wikimedians and BHL catalogers with crucial clues that aid in name disambiguation. In particular, hyperlinks to other knowledge bases are incredibly valuable because they lead to new knowledge pathways that help confirm a person’s identity in a complex game of “Who’s Who?”