Welcome to the Biodiversity Heritage Library Blog

I had the honor of delivering an invited paper to the 8th Shanghai International Library Forum in Shanghai, China, 8 July 2016.

The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS) is a nonprofit organization based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that offers a variety of gardening programs and activities to its members as well as the surrounding city and state. Its annual Philadelphia Flower Show is the largest and longest-running event of its kind, attracting florists, gardeners, and landscape designers from all over the world.

April, May, and June were busy months for processing license agreements and adding new in-copyright titles: 35 in all, bringing our total to 56 for the first half of 2016! Many licensors outside the BHL Consortium gave permission for their content, which adds contemporary scholarship to the collection already rich in legacy literature. Below is the full list of in-copyright titles added between April 1st and June 30th, 2016.

Australia has over 1,600 species of native bees. As a young university student in 1979, I was keen to learn all I could about these diverse species. However, I soon found that the original descriptions of many of these bees were in obscure books and journals dating from the late 1700s to the early 1900s, only available in specialised research libraries. Unravelling the secrets of Australian native bees would prove to be a challenge! When naturalist Joseph Banks arrived in Australia in 1770 with the first British expedition, he found an astounding new world of undescribed species. Amongst the hundreds of specimens that he collected were a blue-banded bee, a resin bee, a carpenter bee and a wasp-mimic bee.

The BHL API will be updated on 25 July 2016 to support changes to the BHL site. These changes will accommodate identifying additional Contributors for Items and Parts of items. First are changes to the API that may affect your existing processes. The Contributor and ContributorID elements in the result sets of API methods that return “Part” information will move. ContributorID will be included as a PartIdentifier in the Identifiers list. Contributor will be included in a new Contributors list. These changes are being made to accommodate more than one contributor per part.

We are excited to announce that BHL has been named a joint-winner of the inaugural Digital Library Federation (DLF) 2016 Community/Capacity Award, along with the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB)! During the month of June, DLF member organizations voted on an impressive list of 16 nominees to determine the award winner.