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  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
    • BHL at 20
  • User Stories
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    • Fossil Stories
    • Garden Stories
    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
  • Tech Blog
  • Visit BHL
Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL
BHL News, Blog Reel

BHL Welcomes Three New Affiliates

BHL is pleased to welcome three long-time Partners as the consortium’s newest Affiliates: BHL Egypt, BHL China, and BHL SciELO.

The BHL consortium now consists of 18 Members and 18 Affiliates. Members and Affiliates contribute content, provide technical services, and participate in BHL committees, task forces, and working groups. Additionally, Members, who contribute 10,000 USD in annual dues, have governance privileges and vote on strategic directives.

BHL Egypt 

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BHL Egypt, led by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA), joined the Biodiversity Heritage Library in 2009. A major library and cultural center located in Alexandria, Egypt, Bibliotecha Alexandrina has long brought considerable technical expertise to the BHL consortium. The BA provides access to a subset of the BHL collection through its own Digital Assets Repository, which features an Arabic-aware (right to left) book reader. As an Affiliate, BHL Egypt will continue to provide technical support and services to facilitate BHL’s ongoing development.

BHL China 

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BHL China, founded by the Institute of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s first Affiliate in China. Established in 1928, the Institute of Botany is one of the oldest comprehensive research institutions in China. Host to the largest herbarium in Asia, two botanical gardens, and several laboratories, the Institute is a national leader in the development of the country’s plant science research. Since first joining BHL as a partner in 2010, the Institute of Botany has contributed over 325,000 pages to BHL through the BHL China program.

BHL SciELO 

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The BHL SciELO Network is the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s first Affiliate in South America. BHL SciELO is implemented by the Scientific Electronic Library (SciELO) Program, which encompass a network of national collections of open access journals in 15 countries. SciELO Brazil coordinates the BHL SciELO Network involving the main biodiversity libraries of Brazil with political and financial support from the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) and the Secretary of Biodiversity of the Ministry of Environment. SciELO joined BHL as a partner in 2010, and since then it has contributed over 107,000 pages to BHL’s collection.

July 3, 2017by Grace Costantino
BHL News, Blog Reel

Internet Archive Library Leaders Forum 2016

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At the end of October I attended the Internet Archive Library Leaders Forum 2016. This was the 3rd time I’ve attended this meeting since 2009 and was by far the best one yet! The Forum coincided with IA’s 20th anniversary so there was a big push from IA to showcase their latest and greatest to celebrate their platinum year.

Some of the coolest new features highlighted:

  • The ability to perform a full text search across all books and journal volumes in IA such as this full text search for “darwin.”
  • New keyword search functionality for their Wayback Machine – just look at all these web pages about “biodiversity.”
  • Additionally, Wikimedia Foundation is now using the Wayback Machine to fix over 1 million broken links in English Wikipedia! Plus Mozilla is experimenting with the Wayback Machine to develop a pilot that will eliminate the dreaded 404 pages that pop up when Internet links break. How useful!
  • See more of their newest cool innovations
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New GifCities searchable gif database
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New Webverse 3D web visualization tool

The most successful aspect of the Forum was meeting with Internet Archive colleagues and partners face to face, many of which share similar digitization workflow and collection management challenges to BHL. In particular, colleagues from the Getty Research Institute, Georgetown University Law Library and HathiTrust are pursuing projects that could help inform BHL collection development for the future.

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IA Founder Brewster Kahle delivers presentation

Interestingly, as the meeting attendees imagined the future of libraries over the next 10-20 years, I was pleased to hear that some of the challenges shared by both HathiTrust and IA are issues BHL has already considered and continues to explore as its collection and consortium grows:

  • In what ways can we expand the scope of our content? Should we?
  • What are the best strategies to ensure comprehensiveness of your collection?
  • How can we encourage greater curation of our collection?
  • What emphasis should be placed on the development of tools for de-duplication?

The BEST thing accomplished during the Forum was getting access to IA’s Slack tool and encouraging the formation of BHL’s very own channel. Now when questions and problems arise we have a direct line to some of IA’s key digitization management staff. As Digital Collections Manager for BHL this has already proven to be an extremely useful means to troubleshoot digitization and metadata issues.

Internet Archive staff are a positive group of motivated, creative individuals and it was a pleasure attending this productive meeting. Kudos to Wendy Hanamura for organizing a positive experience!

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Me and an IA Petabox storage system
-Bianca Crowley, Digital Collections Manager
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Internet Archive’s official truck
December 21, 2016by [email protected]
BHL News, Blog Reel

Biodiversity Heritage Library Announces Partnership with Digital Public Library of America

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library is pleased to announce that it will serve as a digital content hub within the Digital Public Library of America. The DPLA pilot project, which combines and centralizes links to the collections of participating cultural institutions, launches April 18 in Boston.

As a result of BHL’s participation as a digital content hub, links to over 111,000 BHL volumes will be available within the DPLA portal. Through the DPLA, the Biodiversity Heritage Library will collaborate with renowned libraries, universities, archives and museums to reach a wide national audience.

“The Biodiversity Heritage Library is excited to be part of the Digital Public Library of America and to provide an important body of literature that will support the important mission of providing openly available scientific publications,” said Martin Kalfatovic, BHL Program Director.

Kalfatovic served, along with founding BHL Technical Director Chris Freeland, as first co-chairs of the DPLA’s Technical Aspects Workstream.

“We are thrilled to have the Biodiversity Heritage Library as a Content Hub,” said Emily Gore, DPLA Director for Content. “The BHL shares the DPLA’s commitment to open access and global data sharing, and brings rich biodiversity collections from a number of natural history and botanical libraries to the DPLA.”

About the Digital Public Library of America

The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science. The DPLA aims to expand this crucial realm of openly available materials, and make those riches more easily discovered and more widely usable and used. More information is online at http://dp.la. To find out more about the DPLA launch, April 18-19 in Boston, visit http://dp.la/get-involved/events/launch/.

April 9, 2013by ulib-libraryjobs

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About BHL

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”

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