Biodiversity Heritage Library
Biodiversity Heritage Library logo
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Type of site
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Digital library |
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| Website | biodiversitylibrary |
| Commercial | No |
| Launched | 2005 |
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.” The BHL consortium works with the international taxonomic community, rights holders, and other interested parties to ensure that this biodiversity heritage is made available to a global audience through open access principles. In partnership with the Internet Archive and through local digitization efforts, the BHL has digitized millions of pages of taxonomic literature, representing tens of thousands of titles and more than 100,000 volumes.
Founded in 2005, BHL soon became the third broad digitization project for biodiversity literature, after Gallica and AnimalBase. In 2008, the size of Gallica and AnimalBase was passed, and BHL is now by far the world's largest digitization project for biodiversity literature.
It is a cornerstone organization of the Encyclopedia of Life.
Initially, the Biodiversity Heritage Library was a collaboration of ten natural history and botanical libraries and currently, it has fourteen members. The founding member libraries are:
In May 2009, two new members were added to the consortium:
In November 2011, two new members were added to the consortium:
In February 2013, one new member was added to the consortium:
Since 2009, the BHL has expanded globally. The European Commission’s eContentPlus program has funded the BHL-Europe project, with 28 institutions, to assemble the European language literature. 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. The global BHL project is managed primarily by the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.), Natural History Museum (London), and Missouri Botanical Garden. Six regional centers are planned. Additionally, the Atlas of Living Australia, Brazil (through SciELO), and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina have created regional BHL nodes. These projects will work together to share content, protocols, services, and digital preservation practices.
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