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We are pleased to announce the release of two new BHL online exhibitions: Early Women in Science and Latino Natural History. Earlier this year, the Smithsonian Women’s Committee awarded a one-year grant to Smithsonian Libraries (SIL) to build online exhibitions to showcase the scientific and historical contributions of Women and Latino naturalists and illustrators.

Sharks, Passenger Pigeons, Scientific Illustrations, Crowdsourcing, National Agricultural Library, GBIF, and Semantic Metadata. What do all these things have in common? They’re all BHL news stories from the past few months! Get the latest BHL project news in our latest quarterly report and newsletter! Don’t get our newsletter?

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.