Biodiversity Heritage Library

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is a project for the digitization of literature on biodiversity / biodiversity. It was created around 2005 to life and was initially limited to ten ( twelve from 2009 ) U.S. and British libraries.

After Gallica and AnimalBase BHL was thus the world's third largest and African cross- digitization project. Has started in 2006, the digitized literature to provide en masse into the net. 2008, the importance of Gallica and Animal base was rounded up. Today BHL is the world leader by far digitization project for biodiversity literature.

In April 2009, 13 million pages and 11,000 works were digitized, the number of digitized books was in April 2010, 40000-80000, with about 30 million pages ( source: BHL portal). The fact that the libraries may only digitize copyright-free books, digitization at BHL focused so far mainly on literature from before 1920. Some libraries set the limit in 1899. Had this after a few years the effect that it and in zoology Botany now is such that access to literature from before 1900 is much easier than the one that appeared 1920-1990.

Composition of BHL

BHL is a cooperation of 12 natural history libraries in the English-speaking world (UK and USA). BHL works closely with the Encyclopedia of Life.

Members of the consortium are the libraries of the following institutions:

• American Museum of Natural History ( New York)
• Field Museum of Natural History ( Chicago)
• Harvard University ( Cambridge, Massachusetts) with Botany Libraries and
• Ernst Mayr Library of the local Museum of Comparative Zoology
• Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
• Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis)
• Natural History Museum ( London)
• New York Botanical Garden
• Royal Botanic Gardens ( Kew ) (Richmond, UK)
• Smithsonian Institution (Washington)
• Academy of Natural Sciences (Philadelphia )
• California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco)

The BHL portal supports Google Maps API, Ajax, tag clouds and JPEG2000 images.

The term BHL initially only the American- British project was called. In May 2009, in Europe, a consortium consisting of 28 partners EU project BHL-Europe was launched. Shortly thereafter, a project BHL - China was founded in China. Since then (usually just called BHL -US ) and BHL Global distinction between BHL-US/UK. BHL called now (2010 ) is usually the global project.

Global BHL project is led primarily by Smithsonian Institution Washington, Natural History Museum London and the Missouri Botanical Garden. From there, the cooperation with the partner projects will be coordinated in the other continents, being considered are 6 regional centers. In addition to Europe and China to find more projects in Brazil, Australia and Egypt during the preparatory phase (beginning of 2010).