The Biodiversity Heritage Library follows established practices for cataloging works. Each book or journal in BHL’s collection is represented by a bibliographic metadata record that describes the title, creator(s), and other relevant information about the work’s creation and content. The creator(s) listed as part of the records are the personal, family, or corporate names responsible for the overall production of the work. Requests to add additional creators will be considered by the Cataloging and Metadata Committee if the creator is noted on the chief source of information (i.e. the title page) and/or is the predominant contributor to the work (i.e the sole illustrator). This criteria is in accordance with the following factors:
- cataloging best practices – contributions to portions of a work may not qualify under standard cataloging rules for addition at the title level,
- resource constraints – BHL lacks dedicated cataloging resources to generate original catalog records at scale,
- technical constraints of BHL’s database model – BHL’s collection is primarily structured around books, volumes, and articles. It is not possible to add page level metadata at this time.
Enriching Page Level Metadata
BHL acknowledges the work being done to highlight historically marginalized creators whose contributions have gone unrecognized. For now, the best way to add illustrator or photographer information at the page level is to add tags with the creator name(s) to the images in BHL’s Flickr photostream. Tagging the images in Flickr, uploaded from works in BHL, best allows us to identify the creator of the specific images they contributed to the work. Please see our Flickr image tagging guide for instructions.