It’s December, and the holiday season is upon us! Neighborhoods are basking in a many-colored glow cast by light strands hung by the mile, stores have stocked their shelves with every gift and festive item imaginable, and a general atmosphere of good cheer hangs in the air. As you think about buying gifts for your loved ones this season, consider giving a gift to BHL as well.

To date, we’ve scanned over 36 million pages for BHL, but that scanning doesn’t happen by magic. It takes dozens of dedicated staff members and generous financial resources provided by grants, endowments, and donations contributed by the public. We believe in the work we do, and the success of our donations button and the continuous praise we receive for BHL shows us that you do too!

We have a dream to digitize all available taxonomic literature and make it freely available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. During an era in world history where three-quarters of climate change is manmade, it is vital that the critical knowledge held within the legacy literature be made available to scientists, researchers, conservationists, and the public at large so that we can make intelligent decisions to save global biodiversity for generations to come. Without the generous support of grants and donations, this dream will be very difficult to realize.

So, as you brave the malls, overcrowded parking lots, and perhaps over-zealous shoppers, keep BHL in your thoughts. Making a donation to BHL is much simpler than tackling the challenges of department store shopping. All you have to do is click on the “Donate” button located at the top of the BHL website. All donations are tax-deductible, and the easy donation interface allows your to contribute any amount you desire. No gift is too small, and all will contribute to the strengthening and expanding of BHL. Learn more about the BHL donate button in our previous blog post.

Funding for the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) comes from a number of sources. Over the past few years, we have been reliant on the generous support of a number of different foundations, directly or through grants to individual BHL members. These foundations include the MacArthur Foundation, the Moore Foundation, the Lounsberry Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Keck Foundation. A number of the BHL members have also received grants from the United States government, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the National Science Foundation.

2011 marked the fourth year since the BHL portal officially went live, and in that time we’ve made great strides, just recently reaching 35 million scanned pages. Scientists all over the world use the library to identify and classify new species. The student in her backyard, the forestry manager and ecologist, the museum habitat builder, the artist and the designer – whether the need is for a scientific description of a spider or a beautifully illustrated drawing of an amaryllis, all can benefit from being able to search the biodiversity literature.

As part of the initial redesign of the BHL site, we are now offering the ability for individuals to support the BHL. These transactions are processed through the Smithsonian Institution Libraries’ (SIL) financial system. The SIL hosts the BHL Secretariat and program staff. The Smithsonian Institution is a tax-exempt organization and gifts are tax deductible.

Click on the button on any BHL page (or click here now!) to add your donation to your shopping cart. You can donate preset amounts, or, using the “other” option, a custom amount of your choice.

BHL has made some big changes today. Our site now features a new logo, a new “Donate” button and enhanced social media functionality that significantly improves the way you can interact with and share BHL content.

New Opportunities to Support and Share

We know you love BHL, and from the plethora of feedback that we’ve received from users over the years, we know there are many of you that want to help support us. In light of this feedback, we’ve added new “Donate” functionality to the BHL. By clicking on the “Donate” button at the top of your screen, you have the opportunity to provide tax-deductible financial gifts to BHL that will help support continuing development and scanning. A very warm and heartfelt thanks goes out to our users in advance for checking out this new functionality and considering a gift of support.

You can also show your support of the BHL for free by liking us on Facebook or tweeting about us on Twitter! For some time now, we have been building a presence on a variety of social media platforms, including Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter (for a list of all of our social media accounts, visit our public wiki). We’ve now added new linked icons to each of our social media platforms on the left-hand navigation bar of the BHL website.

We love the way social media has allowed us to connect and interact with users in ways we couldn’t before, including sharing thousands of beautiful images with you, conducting daily trivia contests, and hearing from you about what you like about BHL and what you’d like to see improved or added to our site or collection. As great as this has been, we think we can do more. So, our technical development team has been busy providing you with even more ways to socially interact with BHL content.

With the new Facebook “like” button and the Twitter “tweet” buttons:

you now have the opportunity to “like” or “tweet” about specific titles, volumes, or pages you find in our collection. Go to your favorite title in the BHL and try clicking on one of the buttons shown above. You’ll have a new quick and easy way to share about BHL content via your preferred social media platform. More detailed information about our new social media features is forthcoming in a future blog post. Stay tuned.

The New Face of BHL

The new features we’ve added to our website do more to allow our users to interact directly with and support the BHL project. To highlight these changes we’ve adopted a new logo. Working together with our BHL-Australia colleagues, we decided to let go of our old image and adopt a sleeker, more compact one. With this new logo we are putting a fresh “face” forward to welcome the future of exciting new developments for the BHL. Expect more information on our new logo, its origins, and the process we went through to create it, in a later blog post.

As always, we want to hear from you!

If you have any thoughts or comments about today’s changes, or other ideas that you’d like to see implemented, don’t hesitate to send us some feedback or, better yet, tell us via Facebook or Twitter. Thank you for all your interest and support of the BHL. With your help, we will continue to grow and improve for the long road ahead.