All posts tagged with bhl

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. A global consortium of over 660 contributors, BHL has made more than 63 million pages of biodiversity knowledge freely accessible online. As a cornerstone of biodiversity data infrastructure, it contains the foundation of our understanding of the natural world.

For the past 20 years, the Smithsonian Institution – one of BHL’s 10 founding members – has played the vital role of hosting both the administrative and technical components of BHL. On January 1, 2026, the Smithsonian will no longer host the administrative functions of BHL. This change presents both a new challenge and a new opportunity.

Since July 2016, the papers of taxonomic botanist John Torrey (1796-1873) have been the focus of a digitization and crowdsourced transcription project at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG). Digitizing and Transcribing the John Torrey Papers, organized in coordination with the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, was created in an effort to digitize and make virtually accessible the correspondence of John Torrey and his colleagues, specifically letters received by Dr. Torrey.

Vanity, an art installation by Joseph Gregory Rossano created for and with the support of the Museum of Glass (MOG) in Tacoma, Washington, tells the story of eleven species and subspecies, presumed extinct, presented through the lens of humanity’s role in their demise. The exhibition features historical accounts detailing each species’ “discovery” (collection date, type locality, collector, scientific illustrations, etc.), humanity’s role in its extinction, and the year it was declared “Extinct”. To produce these species tales, Rossano collaborated with Sandra I. Berríos-Torres, MD. Berríos-Torres served as author of the 11 historical accounts and as Editorial Director of the exhibition catalogue, on behalf of Joseph Gregory Rossano.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library was a crucial resource for Berríos-Torres. Consulting dozens of publications in BHL while conducting research for Vanity, she ultimately cited 16 of them in the historical accounts that were incorporated into the exhibition and catalogue.

As I am wrapping up a short 10-week virtual internship with the Biodiversity Heritage Library, I believe that I will look back on this experience as one of those pivotal opportunities that impact the course of life.

The internship was made possible by the LIS Education and Data Science for the National Digital Platform (LEADS-4-NDP) fellowship program through Drexel University and funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, in collaboration with BHL. LEADS-4-NDP has a mission to improve library services by providing LIS (Library and Information Science) educators and researchers with data science skills.

BHL offered an ideal data science challenge for a future LIS scholar like me to explore: a huge dataset of documents spanning five centuries, along with an engaged community of users and researchers interested in extracting new knowledge from these fascinating texts!

As part of BHL’s mission to ‘improve research methodology by making biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community’, the BHL Secretariat and Partners regularly participate in meetings and initiatives centered on collaborating with other biodiversity organizations throughout the world. One such recent event was the 2nd Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference (GBIC2) held in Copenhagen from 24-27 July 2018.

Organized by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the meeting convened stakeholders from across the biodiversity informatics community to explore a model for coordinating across geographic and political boundaries to share and link data managed by various biodiversity infrastructures. GBIC2 was organized to build on outcomes and recommendations from the first GBIC meeting held in 2012. The Global Biodiversity Informatics Outlook (GBIO) framework (pictured below), developed as part of that first GBIC meeting, served as a foundation for exploring various considerations–from the cultural to the technological–involved in managing and sharing resources related to biodiversity data, evidence, and understanding.

The Digital Data in Biodiversity Research Conference was sponsored by iDigBio, the University of Michigan Herbarium, the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology, and the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology. The conference was attended by about 185 people from a variety of institutions.