Biodiversity Heritage Library

Biodiversity Heritage Library is a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries that cooperate to digitize the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections and to make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global “biodiversity commons.” It works with the international taxonomic community, rights holders, and other interested parties to ensure that this biodiversity heritage is made available to a global audience through open access principles. In partnership with the Internet Archive and through local digitization efforts, it has digitized millions of pages of taxonomic literature, representing tens of thousands of titles and over 150,000 volumes. Biodiversity Heritage Library members digitize the public domain books and journals held within their collections. To acquire additional content and promote free access to information, it has also obtained permission from publishers to digitize and make available biodiversity materials that are still under copyright. Biodiversity Heritage Library’s portal allows users to search the corpus by multiple access points, read the texts online, or download select pages or entire volumes as PDF files. It serves texts with information on over 150 million species names. Using its Global Names Recognition and Discovery and UBio’s taxonomic name finding tools, researchers can bring together publications about species and find links to related content in the Encyclopedia of Life. Because of its commitment to open access, Biodiversity Heritage Library provides a range of services and APIs, which allow users to harvest source data files and reuse content for research purposes. Since 2009, Biodiversity Heritage Library has expanded globally. The European Commission’s eContentPlus program has funded its Europe project, with 28 institutions, to assemble the European language literature. Additionally, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Atlas of Living Australia, Brazil, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and the South African National Biodiversity Institute have created national or regional Biodiversity Heritage Library nodes. Additionally, in 2014, the National Library Board of Singapore became the first institution to join Biodiversity Heritage Library as both a Member of Biodiversity Heritage Library and a global node. Global nodes are organizational structures that may or may not develop their own Biodiversity Heritage Library portals. It is the aim of Biodiversity Heritage Library to share and serve content through the Biodiversity Heritage Library portal developed and maintained at the Missouri Botanical Garden. These projects work together to share content, protocols, services, and digital preservation practices.

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