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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) has made significant contributions to the research community over the past five years.  One of the largest has been to successfully digitize a significant mass of biodiversity literature (nearly 40 million pages) and make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global “biodiversity commons.”

Two missions collide: Free, Open, and Global! Wikipedia we love you.

Since 2009, we have been looking at Wikipedia as a way to drive new user traffic to the Biodiversity Heritage Library while improving the content and accuracy of Wikipedia’s articles. This symbiotic relationship has had a few bumps along the way but, our recent attendance at the 8th Annual Wikimania Conference held in Washington, DC, reaffirmed our commitment to increase our Wikipedia efforts which include adding our Flickr images to the Wikimedia commons file repository as well as inserting species citations, and external links to auto-generated BHL taxon name bibliographies. During this week-long conference, we were inspired by the sense of mission, ingenuity and passion that our fellow Wikipedians demonstrated.

The mission of the Biodiversity Heritage Library is to build an open access digital library of biodiversity literature for the world. For the past several years, the BHL has been building upon its global network of partners, and on June 14-15, 2012, over 25 librarians, scientists and information technology managers came together at Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden to discuss the possibilities for developing a BHL node in Africa. This organization and planning meeting was generously funded by the JRS Biodiversity Foundation and was a direct follow up to the initial JRS funded meetings hosted by the Biodiversity Synthesis Center/Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago in November, 2011.