The Biodiversity Heritage Library is pleased to welcome two new Affiliates in 2023: Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, and Meise Botanic Garden in Meise, Belgium. The BHL Consortium now includes 19 Members and 23 Affiliates.

Founded in 1940 as a gift from Robert and Mildred Bliss, Dumbarton Oaks is a Harvard University research institute, library, museum, and garden located in Washington, DC. The Dumbarton Oaks Library and Archives include collections on botanical illustrations, plant collecting, reports from scientific expeditions, rare books, and much more.

“We have been working closely with the Biodiversity Heritage Library since 2018,” said Dumbarton Oaks executive director Yota Batsaki. “The Plant Humanities Lab, an open access digital platform we have created, utilizes the extraordinary resources of the BHL and other repositories to study and communicate how plants have shaped human cultures and our planet. The Lab demonstrates how historical collections in the BHL—such as herbarium specimens, botanical illustrations, and field notes—can be integrated into environmental and cultural narratives of urgent significance. We are delighted to strengthen this collaboration by contributing our own digitized content to this invaluable repository.”

Plate [1]. Bardi, Pietri. Catalogo dei fiori dei giardini di Firenze e di Montui. 1787. Contributed in BHL by Dumbarton Oaks.

Meise Botanic Garden, founded in 1870, holds collections that date back to its predecessor, the Royal Dutch Horticultural and Arboricultural Society, which was established in Brussels in 1826 under Dutch rule.

The library at Meise Botanic Garden holds some 250,000 volumes and 10,000 periodical titles on various subjects including botany, mycology, ethnobotany, floristics, botanical history and horticulture. It also houses significant special collections of archives, manuscripts, photo archives and original natural history illustrations.

Bouchout Castle (Meise Botanic Garden)

The library aims to expand this unique collection, preserve this important scientific and cultural heritage, and make it available to researchers worldwide.

“This is why I am so pleased that the Meise Botanic Garden has the opportunity to widely share a part of this collected literature through BHL,” stated Nicole Hanquart, Head of Library, Art and Archives at Meise Botanic Garden. “Increasing access to the collections is a high institutional priority. Doing it through BHL, which is an essential tool for our researchers, is a major asset.”

Meise Botanic Garden has actively participated as a content provider in BHL Europe since 2009. As part of its new affiliation, it plans to contribute with its own publications as well as with additional titles identified from its collection that are not yet in BHL. The focus will be on botanical literature on Belgium and Central Africa.

Plate CC. Linden, J.J, e.a. Lindenia : Iconographie des orchidées. vol. 5(1889). Contributed in BHL by Meise Botanic Garden.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is pleased to welcome the Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira as a new Affiliate. Auckland Museum is BHL’s first partner in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Tracing its roots back to 1852, Auckland Museum was one of New Zealand’s first museums and is regarded as one of the finest in the Southern Hemisphere. Renowned for its collection of Māori and Pacific treasures along with significant natural history resources, the Museum tells the story of New Zealand, its place in the Pacific and its people. It is also a war memorial for the province of Auckland.

The Museum is home to one of New Zealand’s finest heritage research libraries. Serving the Museum since 1867, the Library’s key focus is caring for and providing access to the Museum’s Documentary Heritage collections, including manuscripts, photographs and artwork, ephemera, oral histories, rare books, and serials. The Library’s collections have an overarching focus on the Auckland province and te ao Māori (the Māori world), and its natural history collection strengths include botany, and academic and general-interest works related to the natural sciences.

“Auckland Museum’s long natural history specialism has resulted in a world-class collection of New Zealand specimens of flora and fauna. Coupled with published research and a wealth of untapped curatorial correspondence, our holdings will be a valuable addition to the BHL community,” affirmed Adam Moriarty, Head of Information, Library and Enquiry Services at the Auckland Museum. “As the first New Zealand-based institution to join the BHL, we can dramatically increase what the world knows about Aotearoa’s unique natural environment.”

BHL representatives Constance Rinaldo (Ernst Mayr Library, Harvard and Chair of the BHL Members’ Council) and Dr. Elycia Wallis and Nicole Kearney (BHL Australia) traveled to the Museum in early September to welcome the Library and provide an orientation to the BHL program. In late October, Kearney, manager of the BHL Australia program, and Cerise Howard, digitization coordinator for BHL Australia, returned to provide an intensive three-day training workshop to Library staff covering a broad range of topics from metadata requirements to digitization workflow processes.

Nicole Kearney (front) and Cerise Howard (back), BHL Australia, with colleagues from Auckland Museum during the three-day workshop at the Library in Auckland.

Following the workshop, staff digitized the Library’s first contribution to BHL: An epitome of the natural history of the insects of New Holland, New Zealand, New Guinea, Otaheite, and other islands in the Indian, Southern, and Pacific oceans (1805) by Edward Donovan. This rare work includes hand-colored drawings and descriptions of over 100 species from Australia, New Zealand, and neighboring islands. The title is the first of many currently being digitized for BHL from the Library’s collection.

Plate 13. Donovan, Edward. An epitome of the natural history of the insects of New Holland, New Zealand, New Guinea, Otaheite, and other islands in the Indian, Southern, and Pacific oceans. 1805. Illustration by Donovan. Contributed in BHL from Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira.

We are delighted to see our partnerships in Australasia expand to New Zealand through the Auckland Museum and look forward to seeing many more fascinating contributions to the BHL collection in the future. We also extend our thanks to our BHL Australia colleagues for providing training and support to our newest Affiliate.

Plate 10. Donovan, Edward. An epitome of the natural history of the insects of New Holland, New Zealand, New Guinea, Otaheite, and other islands in the Indian, Southern, and Pacific oceans. 1805. Illustration by Donovan. Contributed in BHL from Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira.

“We are thrilled to welcome the Auckland Museum as our first partner in New Zealand,” affirmed Martin R. Kalfatovic, Program Director for the Biodiversity Heritage Library. “We have long desired to establish a partnership in the country, and we look forward to working with our colleagues in Auckland to share their collections with global audiences and foster new relationships with other institutions across the New Zealand.”

The BHL Consortium now includes 20 Members, 22 Affiliates, and over 80 partners globally. Learn more.

Over the years, the BHL consortium has grown from its initial core of 10 members to now 15 member institutions across the United States and the United Kingdom.

While each institution contributes its own unique set of materials to the BHL collection, many of our collections share similar materials. Thank goodness we do because we rely on each other to help fill in gaps in the BHL corpus. But this is easier said than done. Have you ever tried to amass a complete set of 90+ year old objects into one place?!

The quick and dirty explanation of our digitization process is as follows — BHL consortium libraries:

1. Work together to select books for scanning
2. Do our best to make sure we don’t send the same materials for scanning, i.e. “de-duplication”
3. Send the books from our shelves for scanning to various Internet Archive locations or to our own institutional scanning centers
4. Send the bibliographic data from our library catalogs
5. Render derivative files, such as the OCR (optical character recognition) text files
6. Aggregate the data files and images for every page of every book scanned into our back-end database managed by the Missouri Botanical Garden
7. Serve it all up via our website: http://biodiversitylibrary.org

And for those of us who prefer visuals:

Steps 1 and 2 can get complicated. Fast. Which is why we need the tools to help us coordinate who’s scanning what, when. To manage our communications we use an issue tracking system, in our case Countersoft’s Gemini system. Whenever you submit feedback via our website, a new issue, or ticket, is created in our system which we route to the appropriate BHL Staff for follow up. Send us feedback telling us something’s missing from our collection and we’ll try to find the BHL library who can send it for scanning. Sounds easy enough, right?

Wrong. Enter an old journal series which over the course of decades, centuries even, can modify its scope, alter its publication title and alter it again (and again…). Combine this with the changing practices of the printing, bookbinding, and library industries over the course of history and you have quite the task to gather the various pieces of the puzzle and arrange them into the complete picture of a publication.

Bibliography of Asiatic Society publications,

The Journal of the Asiatic Society is one of my favorite examples of how the BHL member libraries work together to accomplish this task.  The Journal changed its title various times since the late 18th Century and we have 4 of them in the BHL starting with Asiatick Researches (1788-1849) to the Journal and the Proceedings of the Asiatic Society (1905-1934). Since we started digitizing books for the BHL in 2007, this series has called on 7 different libraries to send various volumes for scanning in an effort to complete the digital set. The work still continues today. With so many libraries involved, it is not uncommon for there to be 3 different ways the titles were cataloged and 5 different ways the volumes were bound, for example, making the work of selection and de-duplication rather tricky.

Without systems that allow us to communicate in detail about who’s scanning precisely what, when, we’d have no way to aggregate 15 different physical library collections into a single BHL collection online. Our issue tracking system is just one of many tools that we use to communicate across various aspects of our digitization workflow. However, the tools would not mean anything if it were not for the hard work and collaborative spirit of the librarians throughout our consortium.

In November, 2011, at the Life and Literature Conference in Chicago, IL, BHL announced the addition of its fourteenth consortium member, the United States Geological Survey Library (see a list of member libraries on our wiki). Since the announcement, BHL staff have been diligently working with USGS to fully integrate our new library member into BHL workflows and procedures, and it won’t be long before you can access new USGS material in the BHL portal. We at BHL, along with our new colleagues at USGS, are thrilled about this important development in the BHL project.

When asked what contributions USGS could make to the BHL corpus, Richard Huffine, Library Director, replied, “The USGS mission has always spanned both the physical and life sciences. From our historical work in paleontology to our current research in ecosystems, we have collections that will definitely compliment the current holdings of the BHL.” The USGS is focusing their early contributions on filling gaps in BHL and adding a collection of rare research in paleobotany. As Huffine further added, “We’re excited to be part of this historic effort and are looking forward to seeing the BHL reflect the full breadth and depth of what biodiversity means.”

Created in 1879, the U.S. Geological Survey maintains one of the world’s largest libraries dedicated to the earth and natural sciences. Scientific research is a key part of the Survey’s mission, and this work is supported by a wide array of monitoring activities and scientific collections, more than 1,000 research scientists and a library with more than 2,000,000 volumes, 1,500,000 maps and 800 current serial titles. For more information about the U.S. Geological Survey, visit http://library.usgs.gov/.

We are thrilled to add the United States Geological Survey Library to the BHL ranks. We are confident they will contribute a unique array of important biodiversity texts to the over 102,ooo volumes and 38 million pages currently available. Welcome to the team, USGS!