Digitsation on a global scale: BHL at 10

On 13 April 2016, Library, Art & Archives hosted an Open Partners Meeting of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). The meeting was part of a week-long series of BHL@10 events hosted jointly by the Natural History Museum and Kew, celebrating 10 years of the resource and all that has been achieved so far. But what is exactly is BHL and why has it become so successful?

 

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries that collaborate to digitise biodiversity literature held in their collections. The term ‘biodiversity’ here refers to the variety of plant and animal life on Earth.

Much of the published literature on biological diversity is available in only a few select libraries in the developed world, yet conversely much of the interesting biology is in the developing world. Biologists have therefore long considered that access to the published literature is one of the chief impediments to the efficiency of research in the field.

In order to document Earth's species and understand the complexities of swiftly-changing ecosystems in the midst of a major extinction crisis and widespread climate change, scientists need something that no single library can provide - access to the world's collective knowledge about biodiversity. BHL addresses this by firstly digitising literature and then making it freely available to the global audience.

 

What about copyright?

The BHL focusses on material in the public domain which is therefore out of copyright. However, members of the consortium also regularly approach publishers for permission to digitise biodiversity materials which are still in copyright and have had great success with this. In fact, in some cases, the publishers have actually approached BHL and asked for their titles to be included in the Library!

At the time of writing, the BHL has scanned a total of 49 million pages leading to 107,584 titles now being available online. An incredible achievement, but there is still much work to be done.  

Open Partners Meeting at Kew

40 delegates from peer organisations across the world attended the meeting at Kew, many of whom had not visited before and were clearly inspired by both the Library, Art & Archives collections and also the Gardens themselves. As part of the day’s agenda, a live Google Hangout interview took place with Martin Kalfatovic, BHL Programme Director and Rod Page, creator of BioStor for a discussion about BHL’s impact on science and the possibilities for the future. The interview can be seen here: http://bit.do/BHLLetsTalkImpact

The events throughout the week at the Natural History Museum and Kew provided an important opportunity for BHL partners to both reflect on all that had been achieved over the past 10 years and also to discuss ideas for further development of the resource in the future.

 

BHL and Kew

Kew was a founding member of BHL and continues to play a key role on the executive committee for the programme. The library is planning to significantly increase its contributions of content to the resource over the coming years through additional digitisation of both library and also archives materials. 

Further information about the BHL@10 celebrations and online events is available here: www.biodiversitylibrary.org/collection/BHLat10

- David Iggulden -