BHL Bi-annual Newsletter (November 2023)

BI-ANNUAL NEWSLETTER | November 2023

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) improves research methodology by collaboratively making biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community.

I am a regular user of BHL, and I cannot imagine how we ever managed to get anything done before we had access to this wonderful resource. Herbarium Curator

Support BHL This Giving Tuesday

Your contribution to BHL this Giving Tuesday helps inspire discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge. Thanks to our global partners and generous support from people like you, BHL makes over 61 million pages of biodiversity literature openly accessible.

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Flora, Fauna, and Photography: Five Years of Digitising Content for BHL in Aotearoa

Auckland Museum joined BHL in 2018 and currently remains the only organisation in Aotearoa New Zealand contributing to the consortium. With over 25,000 pages in more than 100 biodiversity literature items, the Auckland Museum collection spans more than 200 years of biological knowledge. Browse through this collection of field notebooks, identification guides, records and proceedings, educational textbooks, plant material, cyanotypes (blueprints), and hand-painted illustrations on BHL.

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BHL Welcomes Two New Affiliates

The Biodiversity Heritage Library was pleased to welcome two new Affiliates in 2023: Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, and Meise Botanic Garden in Meise, Belgium. The BHL Consortium now includes 19 Members and 23 Affiliates. Explore unique content from our new Affiliates!

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Illuminating BHL’s Dark Data: Citizen Scientists and AI Unlock Key Biodiversity Data in GBIF

Technical staff from BHL are working to establish a scalable data pipeline of occurrence data currently trapped in archival field notes, journals, letters, correspondence, and other primary source materials housed in BHL. Thanks to a pilot project with researchers from Harvard University and volunteer transcription projects hosted via DigiVol, BHL was able to make its first deposit of occurrence data into the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). This deposit of historic biodiversity data demonstrates how valuable BHL’s collection is to global biodata infrastructure, as it plays a crucial role in establishing species base lines, informing climate change studies, tracking key environmental indicators, and contributing to the development of global biodiversity monitoring platforms.

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Unifying Biodiversity Knowledge to Support Life on a Sustainable Planet by Jacqueline J. Dearborn

Interlinking BHL Data in the Wikimedia Project Ecosystem

The planet is at a critical juncture, where urgent action is required to combat climate change and biodiversity loss. With the release of the recent BHL Wikimedia white paper entitled Unifying Biodiversity Knowledge to Support Life on a Sustainable Planet, BHL hopes that an expanded data vision for the BHL community presents new opportunities with Wikimedia projects and the emergent semantic web. The white paper sheds light on BHL’s crucial role as a member of the biodiversity informatics community and reveals a series of key use cases and big data challenges that, if addressed, could be opportunities to enhance global biodiversity data infrastructure.

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