Welcome to the Biodiversity Heritage Library Blog

On 17 June 2014, a visiting delegation of librarians from across Russia visited Smithsonian Libraries and our BHL operations.

Once an amazing diversity of birds–some in breathtaking abundance–inhabited the vast forests and plains of North America. But starting around 1600, some species began to disappear, as humans altered habitats, over-hunted, and introduced predators. A notable extinction occurred 100 years ago, with the death of Martha the Passenger Pigeon, the last member of a species that once filled America’s skies.

Dr. Patricia Mergen, Liaison Officer,  Legal Entity Appointed Representative (LEAR) at the European Commission, Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium, visited the BHL Secretariat and Smithsonian Libraries on 31 May 2014. Mergen was in Washington to attend the Catalogue of Life Workshop and  Symposium (2-4 June 2014). In discussions with Program Director Martin Kalfatovic and Program Manager Carolyn Sheffield, Mergen gave updates on activities of BHL Europe and upcoming European biodiversity initiatives, including the Horizon 2020 programme.

On May 28, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) co-hosted an evening program on digital volunteerism.  The event was organized by The Smithsonian Associates (TSA) and was attended by 74 people. Carolyn Sheffield (BHL), Katja Schulz (EOL), and Jen Hammock (EOL) presented on BHL, EOL, and examples of how people could contribute to growing our knowledge of the planet’s biodiversity.

The Biodiversity Heritage is a charter signatory of the Bouchout Declaration  for Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management. The Declaration is a call to action for institutions to support biodiversity knowledge management.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is pleased to announce that nine of the Smithsonian field books that were cataloged and imaged as part of the Field Book Project are now available through the BHL portal! With over 43 million pages of the published biodiversity literature, BHL has greatly improved the efficiency of access to the published literature–much of which was previously available in limited physical copies in but a few select libraries in the developed world.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library, headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries, welcomes the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a new member. The 16th member of the BHL consortium, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will help identify and digitize historical science literature from its collections and add these to the BHL’s online holdings, where all materials may be accessed free by the public. “The Biodiversity Heritage Library is the preeminent global repository for historic science literature,” said Martin Kalfatovic, BHL program director and associate director for digital services at the Smithsonian Libraries.