University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Main Library

The Biodiversity Heritage Library, headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries, welcomes the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a new member. The 16th member of the BHL consortium, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will help identify and digitize historical science literature from its collections and add these to the BHL’s online holdings, where all materials may be accessed free by the public.

“The Biodiversity Heritage Library is the preeminent global repository for historic science literature,” said Martin Kalfatovic, BHL program director and associate director for digital services at the Smithsonian Libraries. “The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has partnered from the start with the BHL and BHL members for many years and we are excited that we can formalize our partnership by welcoming them as our 16th member.”

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library is a campus-wide network of libraries serving programs of learning and research in many disciplines and is the largest public university research library in the country with more than 13 million volumes. The Biology Library collection alone contains over 137,000 volumes and there are many more in related departmental libraries on campus, such as the agriculture, natural history, and rare book and manuscript collections. For more information about the University Library, please visit library.illinois.edu.

The current members of the BHL include: the American Museum of Natural History (New York, N.Y.), the California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco, Calif.), Cornell University (Ithaca, N.Y.), the Botany Libraries (Harvard University), the Ernst Mayr Library at the Museum of Comparative Zoology (Cambridge, Mass.), the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.), the Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Woods Hole, Mass.), the Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis, Mo.), the National Library Board (Singapore), the Natural History Museum (London), the Kew York Botanical Garden (Bronx, N.Y.), the Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew, United Kingdom), the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.) and the United States Geological Survey. Additionally, three institutions participate at the affiliate level: the Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago, Ill.), the American of Natural Sciences of Drexel University (Philadelphia, Pa.) and the Natural History Museum, Los Angeles County (Los Angeles, Calif.).

Beyond the English-language efforts, BHL-Europe includes 28 institutions that are working to digitize European literature. In addition, China, Australia, Egypt, Brazil and Africa have created national or regional nodes that may be accessed through the BHL portal.

On February 22, 2013, we announced that the Library of Congress (LoC) had become the fifteenth member of BHL! As a Steering Committee member, Library of Congress will help us further build the BHL collection by digitizing books in their vast library of over 151 million items.

Becoming a BHL member involves not only dedicating staff and financial resources, but also the signing of an official Memorandum of Understanding. On Thursday, March 28, 2013, Nancy Gwinn (Chair of the BHL Executive Committee and Director of Smithsonian Libraries), Grace Costantino (BHL Program Manager), and Elizabeth O’Brien (Smithsonian Libraries Director of Marketing and Special Events) visited the Library of Congress for a ceremonial signing of the MOU with Roberta Shaffer (Associate Librarian for Library Services, LoC) and Leslie Girard (Confidential Assistant to the Associate Librarian for Library Services, LoC).

Roberta Shaffer (right) signing BHL MOU for LoC with Nancy Gwinn (left). Photo by Elizabeth O’Brien.

So, we’re pleased to say that everything is signed, sealed, and official! We’re so excited to call Library of Congress a partner in our great endeavor to make the world’s biodiversity literature available freely to everyone, everywhere!

And of course, it takes a village to successfully build, maintain, and manage BHL. Each new member must dedicate staff to that village. Learn more about Library of Congress’s representative to BHL, Dr. Tomoko Steen, in our previous blog post. She will coordinate workflows and identify staff to help bring LoC material into our collection of over 40 million open access pages.

Curious to know who else is a BHL member? Check out our BHL membership page.

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!