Access to literature is particularly important to taxonomic researchers. It does not matter whether the original description of a species was published a year ago or a hundred years ago, the taxonomist must still consult the literature in the process of identifying and naming new species. The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries that cooperate to digitize and make accessible the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections and to make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global “biodiversity commons.”
It’s all about the Content: Continuous growth according to each partner’s possibilities. 2008: More than 22,000 volumes, 9.2 million pages. Avg. monthly growth rate: 1,500 volumes, 600,000 pages 2009: 15,000 titles, 40,000 volumes, 16.4million pages 2010: 84,860 volumes, 31.8 million pages, 7.7 million page views since launch (2008), 900,000 unique visitors since launch 2011: 47,768 titles, 94,596 volumes, 35.36 million pages
It’s all about the Content: Continuous growth according to each partner’s possibilities. 2008: More than 22,000 volumes, 9.2 million pages. Avg. monthly growth rate: 1,500 volumes, 600,000 pages 2009: 15,000 titles, 40,000 volumes, 16.4million pages 2010: 84,860 volumes, 31.8 million pages, 7.7 million page views since launch (2008), 900,000 unique visitors since launch 2011: 47,768 titles, 94,596 volumes, 35.36 million pages
Global BHL is a Global Partnership with programs in six continents, we hope to keep expanding to new geographies. The BHL is an agile, geographically distributed, virtual organization that delivers focused research content. Since 2009, the BHL has expanded globally. The European Commission’s eContentPlus program has recently funded the BHL-Europe project, with 28 institutions, to assemble the European language literature. Additionally, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Atlas of Living Australia, Brazil (through SciELO and BIREME), and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina have created regional BHL nodes. These projects will work together to share content, protocols, services, and digital preservation practices.
Redundancy & resilience: Data and Application Mirroring Partners contribute their unique content: Europe, Australia, China and Egypt specialized content. New ideas, tools & services: BHL-Australia Design, BHL-Europe functionality, BHL-Egypt OCR Opportunities for collaborations: IMPACT, ViBRANT, OpenUp! in EU
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries that cooperate to digitize and make accessible the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections and to make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global “biodiversity commons.” BHL also serves as the foundational literature component of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL). BHL content may be freely viewed through the online reader or downloaded (part or complete) in PDF, OCR text or JPG2000 file formats.
The objective of the BHL-Europe project is to make available Europe’s biodiversity information to everyone by improving the interoperability of European biodiversity digital libraries. Furthermore, the project will provide a multilingual access point for biodiversity content through the BHL-Europe web portal with specific functionalities for search and retrieval and through the EUROPEANA portal. BHL-Europe is a 3 year project, involving 28 major natural history museums, botanical gardens and other cooperating institutions, funded in 2009 by the European Commission under the eContentplus programme Different technologies, new content, mirror data Launch by the end of this year (2011)
Chinese Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL-China), the pre-research project funded by the Biodiversity Committee, Chinese Academy of Sciences, is aiming to, through collaboration with BHL (Biodiversity Heritage Library) and in conjunction with other institutes (colleges) on biological research, jointly build a network platform for BHL-China; through the comprehensive collection, sacnning, extraction of the essential biodiversity related literature and the systematical arrangement of the important biodiversity (early focus on botany) literature, to establish an easily-searchable and communitive network platform, while to make the data API compliant and therefore provide documentation data services to biodiversity (including EOL China nodes, Chinese Virtual Herbrium, etc.) and other related research fields. The project is currently under construction. Relying on the project of digital library funded by Institute of Botany, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the digitalization has started with the documentation of plant biodiversity, and will gradually extend to other fields of biology.
The Biodiversity Heritage Library–Australia is the digital literature component of the Atlas of Living Australia. BHL-Au also participates in the consortium of Biodiversity Heritage Libraries and affiliated literature digitisation projects around the world.
Mention BHL-Australia will be scanning their own content into Internet Archive.
Will start replicating data soon with Bibliotheca Alexandrina. The Digital Assets Repository (DAR) is a system developed at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the Library of Alexandria, to create and maintain the Library's digital collections.
BHL US/UK Meeting First Global BHL Meeting in Woods Hole September 2010.
This is a take-away topic, and one we deal with everyday. Language, culture, plans, funding, commitments… all bring new challenges and new opportunities.
First Global BHL Meeting in Woods Hole. This is a take-away topic, and one we deal with everyday. Language, culture, plans, funding, commitments… all bring new challenges and new opportunities.
SUSTAINABLE Preservation of digital resources thru different technologies: IA, Cluster, Egypt’s DAR (Digital Assets Repository, own OCR)
REDUNDANCY Global BHL replication gives us redundancy no single point of failure various new serving options Redundancy achieved through Global Replication and serving. Describe the current state: Uploading all content into IA as the long-term repository Copied seed data and now we are starting to synchronize repositories (IA->WHO, WHO -> NHM, then IA->EGYPT).
Resource: APIs Requirements from Scientific Endeavors, Natural History, Humanities, Global Taxa Names, Specimens,
It’s all about the Content: Continuous growth according to each partner’s possibilities. 2008: More than 22,000 volumes, 9.2 million pages. Avg. monthly growth rate: 1,500 volumes, 600,000 pages 2009: 15,000 titles, 40,000 volumes, 16.4million pages 2010: 84,860 volumes, 31.8 million pages, 7.7 million page views since launch (2008), 900,000 unique visitors since launch 2011: 47,768 titles, 94,596 volumes, 35.36 million pages
Global BHL is a Global Partnership with programs in six continents, we hope to keep expanding to new geographies.
New Challenges: like Electronic publication in Botany.
Open Consultation: It’s been more than 4 years since we started, we are asking now “What should BHL focus on for the next 4-5 years?” Facebook Pg?
The Biodiversity Heritage Library’s activities are also described on a blog