Social:Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe

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Logo of the BHL-Europe project

The Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe (BHL-Europe) was a three-year (2009–2012) EU project aimed to the coordination of digitization of literature on biodiversity. It involved 28 major natural history museums, botanical gardens, libraries and other European institutions. BHL-Europe was founded in Berlin in May 2009 and regarded itself as a European partner project of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) project, which was founded in 2005 and initially formed by ten (since 2009, twelve) United States and British libraries.

BHL-Europe was a best practice network. Important components were the coordination of digitization and the creation of appropriate infrastructure, as well as the consolidation of various European digitization projects under a common centralized and multilingual BHL portal. The scope was to make available the digitized literature under Open Access and Creative Commons licenses, and to improve its searchability (using OCR).

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

Composition of BHL-Europe

The following 28 institutions functioned in May 2009 in Berlin as the founding members of the consortium of BHL-Europe:[1]

  • Museum für Naturkunde (Berlin) (project leadership)
  • Natural History Museum (London)
  • National Museum (Prague)
  • European Digital Library Foundation (Europeana)
  • Angewandte Informationstechnik Forschungsgesellschaft AIT (Graz)
  • Atos Origin Integration France (Paris)
  • Freie Universität Berlin
  • Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (AnimalBase)
  • Naturhistorisches Museum Wien
  • Oberösterreichische Landesmuseen (Linz)
  • Museum and Institute of Zoology, Polish Academy of Sciences (Warszawa)
  • Hungarian Natural History Museum (Budapest)
  • University of Copenhagen
  • Naturalis (Leiden)
  • National Botanic Garden of Belgium - Meise
  • Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren)
  • Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences
  • Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris) (Gallica)
  • Museum national d'histoire naturelle (Paris)
  • Spanish National Research Council (Madrid)
  • Università degli Studi di Firenze
  • Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
  • Species 2000
  • John Wiley & Sons
  • Smithsonian Institution (Washington)
  • Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis)
  • University of Helsinki
  • Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

External links

References