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Today the Biodiversity Heritage Library released a new user interface, including an updated website design, improved book navigation, and article-level access to collections. The new interface was informed by usability studies and is based on the design and functionality of the BHL-Australia portal.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library now has its own collection of images in the Encyclopedia of Life! This collection is comprised of images that have been tagged with species name machine tags, relating the species depicted in each image. The collection currently comprises over 11,000 images representing over 10,000 taxa, and will continue to grow as additional illustrations are tagged in the BHL Flickr.

Two weeks ago, we announced that the Library of Congress has joined the Biodiversity Heritage Library, at the Steering Committee level, as our fifteenth member library. Today, we’re excited to introduce you to Dr. Tomoko Steen, the Library of Congress representative to BHL.

The Library of Congress announced its membership to the Biodiversity Heritage Library today. The fifteenth partner of the BHL, the Library of Congress will contribute to the digitization of historical science literature in the collection. All material will be online, free and available to the public.“The Biodiversity Heritage Library is the preeminent global repository for historic science literature,” said Martin Kalfatovic, Smithsonian Libraries Associate Director for Digital Services and BHL Program Director. “We are excited that the Library of Congress has joined us in this effort, which is a vast information center providing resources to researchers, students and the general public interested in biodiversity.”

Here at BHL, we have partners all over the world, and we try to coordinate our scanning efforts with our partner libraries to ensure that critical content is scanned with maximum efficiency and minimal duplication. This coordination includes collaborating to scan the nearly 2,000 scanning requests we’ve received since 2010. We have a variety of tools and established workflows to help us do this.