The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) has welcomed a new member: the Library of Congress. The fifteenth partner of the BHL, the Library of Congress will contribute to the digitization of historical science literature in the collection. All material will be online, free and available to the public.
Tag: Biodiversity Heritage Library
On July 10-14, 2012, Smithsonian Libraries staff members JJ Ford, Gilbert Borrego and Grace Costantino attended the 8th Annual Wikimania Conference in Washington, D.C. to explore possible collaborations between Wikipedia and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), of which the Smithsonian Libraries is a founding member, is an open access, global digital library initiative dedicated to digitizing the biodiversity-related materials held in the collections of BHL consortium member libraries.

On June 10-15, 2012, Dr. Nancy Gwinn (Smithsonian Libraries Director and Biodiversity Heritage Library Executive Committee Chair),Martin Kalfatovic (Assistant Director, Digital Services Division, Smithsonian Libraries and BHL Program Director), and Grace Costantino (BHL Program Manager), along with several other BHL colleagues from across the US, traveled to Cape Town, South Africa to attend a series of meetings aimed at creating a BHL for sub-Saharan Africa.
An annual conference attracting over 3,500 attendees from over 120 countries, and with translation services in the 7 official IFLA languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Russian and Spanish), the event feels like a library conference mixed with a UN meeting.
If you’ve seen any of the 1,000+ physical copies of the books scanned through the History, Art, and Culture (HAC) Digitization Project, maybe you noticed a sticker just below the barcode that reads ”ONLINE.”