Biodiversity Heritage Library Adds Two Partners

The Biodiversity Heritage Library, headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries, welcomes the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign, Ill.) and Washington University (St. Louis) as new partners. The two institutions will help identify and digitize historical science literature from their collections to add to BHL’s online holdings, where all materials may be accessed for free by the public.

“The Biodiversity Heritage Library is the preeminent global repository for historic science literature,” said Martin Kalfatovic, BHL program director and associate director for digital services at the Smithsonian Libraries. “We are excited that the University of Illinois and Washington University Libraries are joining us in building a vast information center that provides resources to researchers, students and anyone interested in biodiversity.”

The current members of the BHL include the American Museum of Natural History (New York), the California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco), Cornell University (Ithaca, N.Y.), the Botany Libraries (Harvard University), the Ernst Mayr Library at the Museum of Comparative Zoology (Cambridge, Mass.), the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.), the Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Woods Hole, Mass.), the Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis), the National Library Board (Singapore), the Natural History Museum (London), the New York Botanical Garden (Bronx, N.Y.), the Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew, United Kingdom), the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.) and the United States Geological Survey. In addition, three institutions participate at the affiliate level: the Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago), the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University (Philadelphia) and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Beyond the English-language efforts, BHL-Europe includes 28 institutions that are working to digitize European literature. In addition, China, Australia, Egypt, Brazil and Africa have created national or regional nodes that may be accessed through the BHL portal.

About the Biodiversity Heritage Library

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is the literature digitization component of the Encyclopedia of Life, a global effort to document all 1.8 million named species of animals, plants and other forms of life on earth. BHL is a consortium of major natural history, botanical and research libraries. BHL’s goal is to contribute to the global “biodiversity commons” by digitizing and aggregating the resources housed within each of the participating institutions, providing free and open access to the legacy literature that underpins the work of the natural science community. To explore the Biodiversity Heritage Library, visit biodiversitylibrary.org.

About the University of Illinois Library

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library is a campus-wide network of libraries serving programs of learning and research in many disciplines and is the largest public university research library in the country with more than 13 million volumes. The Biology Library collection alone contains more than 137,000 volumes and there are many more in related departmental libraries on campus, such as the agriculture, natural history and rare book and manuscript collections. For more information about the University Library, visit library.illinois.edu.

About Washington University Libraries

Founded in 1853, Washington University in St. Louis is a medium-sized independent research institution widely recognized for its teaching, research, patient care and service to society. Washington University operates seven academic divisions (art and architecture, arts and sciences, business, engineering, law, medicine, and social work and public health), served by 12 libraries whose print holdings number nearly 4.5 million, in addition to millions more books and journals available electronically. For more information about Washington University Libraries, visit library.wustl.edu.

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