The Biodiversity Heritage Library is pleased to welcome the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN) as a new Member. MfN is the first German museum to join the Biodiversity Heritage Library as a Member.

The Museum für Naturkunde Berlin has been a part of the BHL global family for nearly a decade through BHL Europe. Launched in 2009 and coordinated by MfN, the three-year BHL Europe project aimed to improve the interoperability of European biodiversity digital libraries and bring together the digitization activities of institutions across the EU.

“The Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and BHL have been working together for many years towards a shared vision of global open access to worldwide biodiversity collections,” affirms BHL Program Director Martin R. Kalfatovic. “We are excited to strengthen our collaborative efforts through membership and look forward to working with our MfN colleagues to realize our shared vision, expand our international research impact, and pursue further partnerships within Germany and across Europe.”

As a BHL Member, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin will provide technical, digitization, and data management expertise and contribute rare and unique materials from its significant collections. The Museum will also explore opportunities to facilitate participation and contributions from other German organizations and societies. Ongoing participation in the Biodiversity Heritage Library will allow MfN to further its commitment to making biodiversity literature as freely and openly available as possible.

“We believe that the library collections of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin are of high value for both the scientific community as well as other users like citizen scientists and the general public,” asserts Dr. Jana Hoffmann, Head of the Digital World and Information Science programme at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. “BHL supports our efforts in the science programme Digital World and Information Science to open our library physically and digitally, thus positioning the museum as a global and active player ‘For Nature.’”

About the Biodiversity Heritage Library

BHL is a consortium of major natural history, botanical and research libraries that seek to contribute to the global “biodiversity commons” by digitizing and providing free and open access to biodiversity literature and archives from across the globe. For more information, visit the Biodiversity Heritage Library website: www.biodiversitylibrary.org.

About Museum für Naturkunde Berlin

The Museum für Naturkunde – Leibniz-Institut für Evolutions- und Biodiversitätsforschung (MfN) in Berlin is an integrative research museum in the Leibniz Association, a union of non-university German research institutions dedicated to addressing scientific issues of societal importance. Consisting of over 30 million specimens, the Museum’s collections constitute a research infrastructure of worldwide importance. The MfN Library holds 374,000 items representing multidisciplinary fields within the natural sciences and the history of science. With the credo “Für Natur” (“For Nature”) driving all of its work, MfN is dedicated to tackling the major biodiversity and environmental challenges of the 21st century through its operations, research projects, exhibitions, and targeted collaborative efforts.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is pleased to welcome the University Library Johann Christian Senckenberg as a new Affiliate. The University Library is the first German library to join BHL as an Affiliate.

The University Library Johann Christian Senckenberg serves as the Central Library of the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main and functions as an academic library for the City of Frankfurt, a university library with several state commitments for the Rhine-Main region and Hesse, and is a major participant in the national supply of literature.

The University Library’s Biology Collection comprises excellent holdings of historic and modern biodiversity literature, representing some 400,000 volumes on a wide range of biological subjects. The collection is constantly expanding thanks to the Library’s own acquisition efforts, co-funding by the German Research Council (DFG), and exchange activities with the Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung. In 2007, the Virtual Library, comprised of catalog data and online resources including databases and e-journals, was launched to increase visibility of the Biology Collection.

The University Library has a long history of collection digitization and provides access to a large corpus of digitized literature through its “Digitale Sammlungen” portal, including a notable collection of German botanical journals from 1753-1914. In 2017, the Specialised Information Service Biodiversity Research project (co-funded by the German Research Council DFG) was established to enhance access to the Biology Collection. Through continued literature digitization and the development of new services including text mining tools to mobilize data within the literature, the project aims to build a bridge between historical holdings and modern biodiversity research.

As a publicly-funded organization, the University Library Johann Christian Senckenberg is committed to free and open access to research literature and the knowledge contained therein. As a BHL Affiliate, the University Library will expand BHL’s corpus by contributing content from its rich Biology Collection. By enabling free access to Central European biodiversity literature, the Library will significantly enhance discoverability of knowledge contained in a segment of literature which is not yet satisfactorily represented online.

Further Information

See the press release from Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main (German language).
See an English version of the press release on IDW.
Learn more about the University Library Johann Christian Senckenberg.
Learn more about the Specialised Information Service Biodiversity Research project.

This week, we feature one of our colleagues from “across the pond,” as we like to say. Meet Dr. Francisco Welter-Schultes, whose many accomplishments include studying mollusks at the University of Goettingen, initiating and running the AnimalBase project, and, last but certainly not least, participating in the BHL-Europe project!

What is your title, institutional affiliation, and area of interest?

I am a biologist interested in terrestrial molluscs of Europe, working in or affiliated to the University of Goettingen, Germany (I have a small office there and sometimes I am also paid…). Like many researchers in the field of taxonomy and species identification, I had to collect a lot of literature to get to know what many others did before I came in. In passing by I became skilled in writing bibliographies and finding literature. In 2003 I initiated the AnimalBase project to scan literature (from Goettingen Library resources) and create a database to link zoological names with their original descriptions.

How long have you been in your field of study?

First systematic fieldwork in 1985; scientifically since 1990.

When did you first discover BHL?

Must have been in 2005 or 2006. It was part of my job to check if literature was already online somewhere else so that we would not need to scan it in the AnimalBase project. I guess I must have been one of the first regular users of BHL.

What is your opinion of BHL and how has it impacted your research?

My mollusc research became much faster and more efficient since I have been able to check sources online. Not only BHL, also Google Books and other providers, and of course sources provided by BHL-Europe consortium members including our own content (Goettingen), which we hope will some day be accessible in one big portal. Before 2005 I had to go to the library and order book by book, implying delays of several days between research actions. Today this goes much faster. About 70% of the sources I currently need to verify in my mollusc research are BHL sources. I use Google Books only if BHL does not have the title (or if the title does not show up in my BHL search).

How often do you use BHL?

Practically every day of work.

How do you usually use BHL (read the titles online/download whole PDFs/Select Pages to Download for a custom PDF/etc.)?

I usually read the titles online. I usually know exactly what I am looking for. In most cases it’s only checking one or two pages in a title (I know exactly which ones) and then closing the site. The BHL website does not work well on my notebook, and the PDF download function does not work.

What are your favorite features/services on BHL?

A very good default search function – very efficient; I really like it. Page level scrollbox in the online viewer, very useful. Makes my work really quick. I provide links to BHL resources from the AnimalBase website and appreciate that BHL links to items have been stable from the beginning on. I also appreciate very much that BHL is very rarely offline!

If you could change one thing about BHL, what would it be, or what developmental aspect would you like the BHL team to focus on next?

• Improving bibliography metadata (journal volume numbers and years) and most important: page-level metadata. Missing plate numbers and Roman pages in the page-level metadata are a big problem. The page-level scrollbox is very important for my work.

• Online book viewer should be faster; black and white text pages should be shown instead of brown on tan.

• “Scanning more pages” is too easily said, and such a suggestion would not be a good guide for you. “Filling the gaps in serial runs” would be a more useful approach. Actually this is the contrary of “scanning more pages” because identifying gaps in serial runs and scanning single journal volumes is much more expensive than simple and brainless mass digitisation.

If you had to choose one title/item in BHL that has most impacted your research, or one item that you prefer above any other in BHL, what would it be and why?

There are some titles that I consult repeatedly, which are simply the important monographs of European terrestrial Malacology of the late 1880s (Westerlund 1884-1890 and Pfeiffer’s Monographia Heliceorum 1848-1877). Boring for the non-insider. From my experience in researching rare titles I have occasionally found really rare titles in BHL, about which I was very surprised and happy! They were titles I had found to exist only in very few libraries in the world, and I had not suspected BHL had them. These were real BHL highlights.

Thank you, Dr. Welter-Schultes, for giving us a brief glimpse into your life, work, and relationship with BHL! Improving our page-level metadata is certainly a priority for us, and, slowly but surely, we are making our way through the millions of pages in our collection. If there are specific titles for which you’d like to see the pagination improved, please let us know via our Feedback Form! Similarly, as we work to fill gaps in our collection, if there are any specific volumes from specific titles that you’d like us to add, please don’t hesitate to let us know as well.

To learn more about Dr. Welter-Schultes, visit his website. Be sure to check out the BHL-Europe website as well! We look forward to future collaborations and the opportunity to share our resources with our friends on the continent and around the world!