Biodiversity Heritage Library
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a project for the digitization of literature on the subject of biodiversity / biodiversity . It was launched around 2005 and was initially limited to ten (from 2009 twelve) US and British libraries .
After Gallica and AnimalBase , BHL was the third large, cross-niche digitization project worldwide. 2006 began to put the digitized literature en masse on the net. In 2008 the importance of Gallica and AnimalBase was overtaken. Today, BHL is by far the world's leading digitization project for biodiversity literature.
In April 2009, 13 million pages and 11,000 works were digitized; in mid-September 2014 the number of digitized books was around 86,700 titles, around 150,000 volumes or around 44,655,000 pages (source: BHL portal). Because the libraries are only allowed to digitize copyright-free books, digitization at BHL has so far mainly focused on literature from before 1920. Some libraries set the limit at 1899. After just a few years, this had the effect that it was used in zoology and Botany is now such that access to specialist literature from before 1900 is much easier than to that published between 1920 and 1990.
Composition of BHL
BHL is a cooperation of 16 natural history libraries from English-speaking countries (Great Britain and USA). BHL works closely with the Encyclopedia of Life .
Members of the consortium are the libraries of the following institutions:
- American Museum of Natural History (New York)
- Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago)
- Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts) with Botany Libraries and
- Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology there
- Marine Biological Laboratory of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
- Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis)
- Natural History Museum (London)
- New York Botanical Garden
- Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew) (Richmond, UK)
- Smithsonian Institution (Washington)
- Academy of Natural Sciences (Philadelphia)
- California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco)
- Cornell University with Cornell University Library (Ithaca, New York)
- Singapore National Library Board (Singapore)
- United States Geological Survey (Reston, Virginia)
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
The BHL web portal supports Google Maps API , Ajax , tag clouds and JPEG2000 images.
The term BHL was initially only used to describe the US-British project. In May 2009, an EU project BHL-Europe consisting of 28 consortium partners was launched in Europe . Shortly afterwards, a BHL-China project was founded in China. Since then, a distinction has been made between BHL-US / UK (mostly just called BHL-US) and BHL-Global. BHL now (2010) mostly refers to the global project.
The global BHL project is primarily led by the Smithsonian Institution Washington, Natural History Museum London and Missouri Botanical Garden. From there the cooperation with the partner projects in the other continents is coordinated, 6 regional centers are planned. In addition to Europe and China, other projects in Brazil, Australia and Egypt are in the preparatory phase (as of early 2010).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Alston, ER 1879-1882. Biologia Centrali-Americana: Mammalia. - pp. i-xx [= 1-20], 1-220, tab. 1-22. London. (Quaritch). (on-line)
- ↑ Kasperek, G. (2010): Overview of historical biology literature digitization projects - compiled by vifabio, the Virtual Library of Biology. In: Newsletter BHL-Europe, No. 5/6: 11-15 (online) (PDF; 2.1 MB)
- ^ Society for Biological Systematics, Henning Scholz in JPIC News 22 (2009), page 23
- ↑ Biodiversity Heritage Library of Europe , list of partner institutions ( Memento of the original from September 10, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
