All posts in BHL News

The importance and need for unique, persistent identifiers for reliable access to published literature has become widely accepted, and the literature for the biodiversity informatics community is no exception.  For published works, these generally take the form of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). BHL has been consistently assigning CrossRef DOIs to monographic publications for three years. However, the number of items in BHL with DOIs remains relatively small with just over 68,000 assigned to date.  In addition to the remaining monographs, BHL now also has over 140,000 articles identified, primarily via BioStor.

Recent crowdsourcing initiatives are revolutionizing scientific research, allowing the public to help scientists and researchers document, identify, and better understand biodiversity. For example, the Atlas of Living Australia’s FieldData program allows anyone to contribute sightings, photos and observational data to help researchers and natural resource management groups collect and manage biodiversity data.

BHL is pleased to welcome the National Library Board, Singapore as a new member in BHL Central and simultaneously as BHL-Singapore, the newest node in Global BHL. The 16th member of the BHL Central consortium, BHL Singapore 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.

We are pleased to announce that the USDA National Agricultural Library (NAL) has joined the Biodiversity Heritage Library as a BHL Affiliate. BHL has already ingested over 845,000 pages of NAL-digitized content made openly available within the Internet Archive. This formal partnership will allow us to strengthen our collection of agricultural-related content through direct collaboration with NAL.

The National Agricultural Library (NAL) comprises one of the largest collections of materials devoted to agriculture in the world.

American Archives Month celebrates the importance of archives and the work of archivists as they seek to collect, organize, and make accessible unique materials from our nation’s history. The Smithsonian Field Book Project is an exciting example of such work, an effort across SI departments and divisions to increase accessibility to field book content. Field books are important because they are the primary source records of flora, fauna, and ecosystem biodiversity research.

This post originally published on the Museum Victoria blog to welcome the “Art of Science” exhibit to the museum and introduce audiences to BHL. Explore the latest BHL Australia developments in this past post. See the Museum Victoria collection in BHL here.  The Art of Science exhibition presents the finest examples from Museum Victoria’s remarkable collection of natural history artworks.

BHL Program Director Martin Kalfatovic and Harvard Botany Librarian Judy Warnement attended the 7th Annual Global Plants meeting. Chuck Miller (Missouri Botanical Garden) serves on the GPI Steering Committee. The Global Plants Initiative, originally sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, has provided funding for the digitization of herbarium specimens and related materials that are made available via the JSTOR Global Plants platform. JSTOR Global Plants/GPI provides a worldwide audience with invaluable access to botanical information.