Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe

Logo of the BHL-Europe project

The Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe (BHL-Europe) was a three-year (2009–2012) EU project aimed to the coordination of digitization of literature on biodiversity. It involved 28 major natural history museums, botanical gardens, libraries and other European institutions. BHL-Europe was founded in Berlin in May 2009 and regarded itself as a European partner project of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) project, which was founded in 2005 and initially formed by ten (since 2009, twelve) United States and British libraries.

BHL-Europe was a best practice network. Important components were the coordination of digitization and the creation of appropriate infrastructure, as well as the consolidation of various European digitization projects under a common centralized and multilingual BHL portal. The scope was to make available the digitized literature under Open Access and Creative Commons licenses, and to improve its searchability (using OCR).

BHL-Europe was also responsible for the creation of structures for long-term storage of digital information (durability of digital data).

Composition of BHL-Europe

The following 28 institutions functioned in May 2009 in Berlin as the founding members of the consortium of BHL-Europe:

• Museum für Naturkunde (Berlin) (project leadership)
• Natural History Museum (London)
• National Museum (Prague)
• European Digital Library Foundation (Europeana)
• Angewandte Informationstechnik Forschungsgesellschaft AIT (Graz)
• Atos Origin Integration France (Paris)
• Freie Universität Berlin
• Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (AnimalBase)
• Naturhistorisches Museum Wien
• Oberösterreichische Landesmuseen (Linz)
• Museum and Institute of Zoology, Polish Academy of Sciences (Warszawa)
• Hungarian Natural History Museum (Budapest)
• University of Copenhagen
• Naturalis (Leiden)
• National Botanic Garden of Belgium - Meise
• Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren)
• Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences
• Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris) (Gallica)
• Museum national d'histoire naturelle (Paris)
• Spanish National Research Council (Madrid)
• Università degli Studi di Firenze
• Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
• Species 2000
• John Wiley & Sons
• Smithsonian Institution (Washington)
• Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis)
• University of Helsinki
• Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

External links

• http://www.bhl-europe.eu Archived 2012-05-01 at the Wayback Machine
• https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org
• http://www.bhl-china.org