All posts in Blog Reel

In 1849, the first volume of the Papers and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Van Diemen’s Land launched a tradition of advancing knowledge that continues to this day. Established in 1843, the Society is Australia’s oldest Royal Society, and for more than 180 years its prestigious journal of scientific and cultural history has captured the changing face of Tasmania, initially called Van Diemen’s Land by British colonists.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library welcomes Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung as its newest Member. Dr. Jana Hoffmann reflects on how Senckenberg’s specialized libraries will help connect historical biodiversity literature to the collections, data, and research infrastructures that support science today.

Back in June of 2010, the founding institutions of BHL began a major digitization project that would span the work of 11 years, 9 institutions, 19 people, 40 tickets within BHL’s issue tracking system, over 82 comments on those tickets, and countless hours of work. Was this part of a grant funded project to facilitate the digitization and inclusion of millions of pages into BHL’s collection? No. This body of digitization and curation work revolves around the series of titles that are part of the Journal of The Asiatic Society. By June 2021, BHL was gratified to finally call the digitization of all public domain volumes “complete” to the best of its ability.

For BHL’s content to be truly useful, individual articles need to be discoverable, citable, and connected to the wider scholarly record. Rod Page explores how BioStor has helped uncover more than 260,000 articles in BHL, the importance of article-level metadata and DOIs, and how AI may shape the future of article discovery.

The big day is here! BHL’s Tech Team is starting the three-week process of moving BHL’s technical infrastructure from the Smithsonian data center just outside of Washington, DC, to the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois.

Pliny the Elder’s Natural History is one of the most influential works of the ancient world. This post explores BHL’s 1469 Venice edition, contributed by the Natural History Museum, London — a remarkable incunabulum and the oldest printed book in the BHL collection.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library continued our 20th anniversary celebration at our Annual Meeting in London from 27 April to 1 May. This year, founding members and 10th anniversary co-hosts, the Natural History Museum, London and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, welcomed 46 representatives from 30 institutions across 8 countries to gather and plan for BHL’s future.