All posts tagged with collections

The BHL Collections Committee has completed a comprehensive review and revision of BHL’s collection development policy. The new policy is written to provide recommendations and serve the collection management needs of BHL Partners. As a key objective of BHL’s Strategic Plan 2020-2025, the new policy is a significant revision to the original policy written in 2010. In learning together as a collaborative community of practice since then, our understanding of BHL collection management has been expanded and refined to:

• clarify collection management priorities;
• articulate our responsibility to pursue more diverse perspectives;
• outline BHL Partner expectations;
• better define our scope;
• describe BHL-specific curation best practices; and
• provide transparency by posting the complete policy via BHL’s About Site.

Going forward, the collection development policy will be reviewed on a yearly basis for minor updates.

BHL’s digital library provides free and open online access to over 250,000 volumes from the 15th-21st centuries on a wide range of biodiversity subjects. These collections offer great resources to support distance learning.

All of our content can be accessed online for free and in full through our digital library portal at biodiversitylibrary.org. No login, account, or membership is required. You can also freely download anything in our library in a variety of formats. Our FAQ provides information on how to search the library and download content.

In addition to our general collections, we’ve identified a selection of materials that may be of particular interest to educators and students. Explore these resources below.

The Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) is launching a new initiative to reward early-career researchers, within the fields of taxonomy, biodiversity and geodiversity science, who base their research on natural science collections. E-SCORE – Excellence in Scientific Collections-based Research, is a celebration of the new generation of scientists who have shown dedication to the use of collections that help document, describe and understand life on earth, and the processes that have shaped it. The award also celebrates the United Nations endorsed International Day for Biological Diversity, which falls annually on the 22nd of May to commemorate the 1992 adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity. CETAF will award E-SCORE for the first time in 2020 to mark the end of the UN International Decade of Biodiversity.