Welcome to the Biodiversity Heritage Library Blog

BHL is delighted to welcome Amanda Boczar and Leora Siegel to two newly created positions on its Executive Committee, bringing new capacity, experience, and perspectives to help guide BHL through its next chapter.

Stephen A. Forbes and Charles Robertson were pioneering scientists whose groundbreaking research continues to influence our understanding of the natural world. Forbes advanced the fields of biology and ecology, while Robertson explored bees and their relationships with flowers and other insects. Their careful observations and influential publications laid important foundations for modern biological and entomological research.

Together, the BHL community helped secure our independent future. Now we are inviting supporters to become BHL Sustainers and help provide the dependable monthly support needed to keep biodiversity knowledge free and open.

In 1849, the first volume of the Papers and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Van Diemen’s Land launched a tradition of advancing knowledge that continues to this day. Established in 1843, the Society is Australia’s oldest Royal Society, and for more than 180 years its prestigious journal of scientific and cultural history has captured the changing face of Tasmania, initially called Van Diemen’s Land by British colonists.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library welcomes Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung as its newest Member. Dr. Jana Hoffmann reflects on how Senckenberg’s specialized libraries will help connect historical biodiversity literature to the collections, data, and research infrastructures that support science today.

Back in June of 2010, the founding institutions of BHL began a major digitization project that would span the work of 11 years, 9 institutions, 19 people, 40 tickets within BHL’s issue tracking system, over 82 comments on those tickets, and countless hours of work. Was this part of a grant funded project to facilitate the digitization and inclusion of millions of pages into BHL’s collection? No. This body of digitization and curation work revolves around the series of titles that are part of the Journal of The Asiatic Society. By June 2021, BHL was gratified to finally call the digitization of all public domain volumes “complete” to the best of its ability.

For BHL’s content to be truly useful, individual articles need to be discoverable, citable, and connected to the wider scholarly record. Rod Page explores how BioStor has helped uncover more than 260,000 articles in BHL, the importance of article-level metadata and DOIs, and how AI may shape the future of article discovery.