All posts tagged with bhl-australia

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is pleased to welcome BHL Australia as a new Member. BHL Australia was founded in 2010 by the Atlas of Living Australia with Museum Victoria as the Lead Agency undertaking the daily work of running the project. To date, five institutions participate in the BHL Australia program, including Museum Victoria, Australian Museum, Queensland Museum, South Australian Museum, and Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria. Over the past six years, these institutions have contributed journal titles, rare books, monographs and field notebooks to the BHL collection, amounting to over 156,000 pages.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest online repository of library and archival materials related to biodiversity. Its aim is to make the world’s biodiversity literature openly available online. In Australia, BHL is managed by Museum Victoria and we have been contributing to this global resource since 2011. We have a team of wonderful volunteers who digitise our rare books and historic journals and prepare the digital versions for publication online.

As the Coordinator of BHL Australia, I’m based at Museum Victoria in Melbourne. This is a very long way from BHL headquarters in Washington DC – in both space and time. The time difference between Melbourne and DC is 14 hours and, while I’ve had countless conversations with BHL staff via email, our opposing work hours make phone calls or virtual meetings almost impossible. Last month I was able to visit my BHL colleagues in person. I had been invited to speak at the Society of American Archivists conference about my work digitizing and transcribing the handwritten field diaries of Australia’s early naturalists.

In November 2014, Museum Victoria started a project to digitize and transcribe the field diaries in our collection. These diaries, handwritten by Australia’s early field naturalists long before the days of electronic notetaking, are rich in scientific data and historic detail. They provide insights into past species distribution and abundance, as well as the trials and wonders experienced on historic expeditions. They are fascinating sources of information and yet very few people have ever read them.

This post originally published on the Museum Victoria blog to welcome the “Art of Science” exhibit to the museum and introduce audiences to BHL. Explore the latest BHL Australia developments in this past post. See the Museum Victoria collection in BHL here.  The Art of Science exhibition presents the finest examples from Museum Victoria’s remarkable collection of natural history artworks.

For the past year, BHL-Australia has been very quiet. So quiet, in fact, you would be forgiven for forgetting we exist (unless of course you read about our contribution to the new BHL website). Why the silence? Because, in 2013, we ran out of funding. Our digitisation work didn’t stop, however. Deep in the Museum Victoria library, six dedicated volunteers (supervised by equally dedicated library staff) continued to scan and process volumes from our collections and upload them into BHL. We are now thrilled to announce that BHL-Au is back in full force.