Biodiversity Heritage Library

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), created in 2006, is the result of a collaboration of ten natural history museum and botanical garden libraries seeking to digitize core taxonomic literature and to make it free and openly available throughout the world. Today, the BHL includes fifteen member institutions whose efforts have shaped a collection of over 60,000 titles. It is supported through a combination of membership dues, in-kind support from member institutions, contributions from the user community, and direct support from the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, and it reaches tens of thousands of users each year. While managing the complex partnership has not been easy, BHL offers an instructive model for multi-institutional, international collaboration. INTRODUCTION The Biodiversity Heritage Library was created as a way to gather and share several major collections of taxonomic literature and associated materials as collected by participating institutions. As of June 2013, the Biodiversity Heritage Library included 60,202 titles, representing 114,336 volumes and 40.8 million pages. The collection is growing at the rate of approximately 1,500 volumes per month. According to the program director, the Library now contains approximately 30 percent of the extant biodiversity literature and approximately 15 percent of all biodiversity literature (including that under copyright). The BHL has reached agreements with 125 publishers to provide access to 273 titles that include materials under copyright. The Biodiversity Heritage Library developed out of the recognition that scientists needed research materials that were difficult to locate and retrieve. By its nature, taxonomic research relies on the long tail of species descriptions to describe and organize life on earth. Museums had already started to digitize their specimen collections; libraries would make an enormous contribution to scientific scholarship by digitizing the scientific literature based on such specimens. By 2004, the Smithsonian Libraries had already made significant progress toward establishing a digital library of taxonomic literature, and the idea of developing an even larger digital collection, which was clearly needed by the scientific community, Ithaka S+R Case Study