Biodiversity Heritage Library
The Biodiversity Heritage Library is a project for the digitization of literature on biodiversity. It was founded around 2005 and was initially limited to ten (since 2009, twelve) US American and British libraries.
After Gallica and AnimalBase BHL was thus the world's third broad digitization project for biodiversity literature. BHL initiated what was soon called mass digitization of biodiversity literature. In 2008 the importance of Gallica and AnimalBase was passed. Today BHL is by far the world's most important digitization project for biodiversity literature.
Composition of BHL
The Biodiversity Heritage Library is a collaboration of 12 natural history libraries. It is a cornerstone organization of the Encyclopedia of Life. The member libraries are the following:
- American Museum of Natural History (New York)
- Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago)
- Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts) Botany Libraries and
- Ernst Mayr Library des dortigen Museum of Comparative Zoology
- Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
- Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis)
- Natural History Museum (London)
- New York Botanical Garden
- Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (Richmond, United Kingdom)
- Smithsonian Institution (Washington D.C.)
In May 2009, two new members were added to the consortium:
- Academy of Natural Sciences (Philadelphia)
- California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco)
Initially the term BHL was used only for the American-British project. In May 2009 a European partner project BHL-Europe was founded by 28 consortium partners, mostly European libraries. Shortly thereafter another project BHL-China was launched in Beijing, in collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Since then BHL in the strict sense has been called BHL-US/UK (usually only BHL-US), the global project has been referred to as BHL-Global, to distinguish it from the US/UK project. There is a trend (2010) to refer the term BHL to the global project.
The global BHL project is managed primarily by the Smithsonian Institution (Washington D.C.), Natural History Museum (London) and Missouri Botanical Garden. Planned are six regional centers. Besides Europe and China, there are other projects in Brazil, Australia and Egypt in the preparatory phase (early 2010).
There is an online BHL portal featuring Google Maps API integration, AJAX, tag clouds, and JPEG2000 images that facilitate multi-resolution zoom & pan.
External links
See also
List of important publications in biology
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