Welcome to the Biodiversity Heritage Library Blog

Learn more about the BHL harvest process from Internet Archive.

An important feature of the Biodiversity Heritage Library that sets it apart from other mass digitization projects is our incorporation of algorithms and services to mine taxonomically-relevant data from of the 2.9 million (as of the date of this posting) pages digitized through our partnership with the Internet Archive.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Encyclopedia of Life shared a table at the Congressional Family Night held at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

BHL developers have released several significant updates to the BHL portal today. These updates include:For a complete list of bugs and enhancements included in this release, visit our issue tracking web site.

Today, February 12, 2008, we celebrate the 199th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. Last year we honored the 300th anniversary of the birth of Carl Linné and next year will be the double celebrations for Darwin’s bicentenary and the sesquicentennial (mark your calenders now for November 24th!) of the publication of On the Origin of Species. 2008 is thus a good year for those of us involved with the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) to pause for a moment between these landmark anniversary years of 2007 and 2009.

The Feb. 2, 2008 issue of Science News includes an article by Susan Milius (“Biological Moon Shot”) on the Encyclopedia of Life and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. BHL member staff Tom Garnett and Martin Kalfatovic are quote in the article.

Smithsonian Institution Libraries staff members Martin Kalfatovic and Suzanne Pilsk gave a presentation on BHL to staff from the National Agriculture Library, the USDA Agriculture Research Service, the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and others.