Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe

Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe ( BHL-Europe ) is a 3-year ( 2009-2012 ) out blank EU project for coordination of digitization of literature on biodiversity / biodiversity. It includes 28 natural history museums, botanical gardens, libraries and other European institutions. BHL-Europe was launched in Berlin in May 2009 and sees itself as a European partner project of the Biodiversity Heritage Library ( BHL ), an institution founded by ten American and British libraries in 2005.

BHL-Europe is a Best Practice Network, important building blocks are the coordination of digitization and creation of related infrastructure, as well as the summary of various European digitization projects under a common central and multilingual BHL Portal. The literature will be made available under open access and Creative Commons licenses, searchability is to be improved (using the OCR text recognition).

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

Composition of BHL-Europe

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

• Museum of Natural History ( Berlin) ( project management)
• Natural History Museum ( London)
• Národní Muzeum ( Prague)
• European Digital Library Foundation (see Europeana )
• Applied Information Technology Research Association AIT (Graz)
• Atos Origin Integration France ( Paris)
• Free University of Berlin
• Georg -August- University Göttingen ( AnimalBase )
• Natural History Museum Vienna
• Upper Austrian Provincial Museums ( Linz)
• Museum and Institute of Zoology of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw )
• Hungarian Natural History Museum ( Budapest)
• University of Copenhagen
• Naturalis (Leiden)
• National Botanic Garden of Belgium - Tit
• Royal Museum for Central Africa ( Tervuren )
• Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences
• Bibliothèque nationale de France ( Paris) ( Gallica )
• Muséum national d' histoire naturelle (Paris)
• Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Madrid )
• University of Florence
• Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
• Species 2000
• John Wiley & Sons
• Smithsonian Institution (Washington)
• Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis)
• University of Helsinki
• Humboldt -Universität zu Berlin