Director’s Report
In 2023 BHL held our first solo annual meeting since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. BHL partners gathered in Paris, France, for the 2023 BHL Annual Meeting. The Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle (MNHN) hosted BHL partners from 17-21 April 2023.
Throughout 2023, BHL Secretariat and Executive Committee staff participated in biodiversity community meetings both in person and virtually, including the 30th meeting of the GBIF governing board and TDWG 2023 conference in Australia, the SPNHC 2023 annual meeting in the US, and the European Botanical and Horticultural Libraries Group (EBHL) annual meeting in the UK.
On a personal note, this BHL Annual Report will mark my last as BHL Program Director. It’s been an honor and pleasure to work with current and past BHL staff over the years and watch as BHL has transformed the biodiversity landscape through all your efforts.
Martin R. Kalfatovic
Biodiversity Heritage Library Program Director
Program News
2023 BHL Annual Meeting – Together Again in Paris
Originally scheduled for 2020, the BHL Annual Meeting finally made it to Paris after two years of virtual meetings and a break to hold the 2022 BHL Annual Meeting in conjunction with the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) and the Natural Sciences Collections Society (NatSCA) meetings in Edinburgh, Scotland.
In addition to our business meetings, our gracious hosts at the library of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle (MNHN) organized an engaging week of tours of library and museum sites, a BHL public symposium titled “Fostering Data Driven Natural Science through Open Digital Libraries”, and evening reception in the Grande Galerie de l’Évolution. In total, the meeting gathered 38 attendees (both in-person and virtually) from 22 BHL partners from around the world. Learn more.
BHL Executive Committee Changes
In July 2023, the Executive Committee held a special election to fill the Co-Secretary position vacated by Elisa Herrmann, who is taking leave from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. Gretchen Rings, Museum Librarian and Head of Library Collections for the Marie Louise Rosenthal Library at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois, was elected to the position. In December 2023, the other Co-Secretary position was vacated by Kevin Merriman as he left Yale University for a new position with the Center for Research Libraries.
You can learn more about the current Executive Committee officers for the 2022-2024 term on the BHL About site.
BHL Welcomed New Affiliates – Dumbarton Oaks and Meise Botanic Garden
BHL was pleased to welcome two new Affiliates in 2023: Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, and Meise Botanic Garden in Meise, Belgium. The BHL Consortium now includes 19 Members and 23 Affiliates. Throughout the year, our new Affiliates worked to incorporate unique items from their collections into BHL. View their collections: Dumbarton Oaks and Meise Botanic Garden. Learn more.
BHL Australia Added Five New Contributors and More Than 85,000 Pages to BHL
BHL Australia had a banner year in terms of growth and contributions to BHL. BHL Australia welcomed five new contributors, ending the year with a total of 48 contributors from museums, libraries, herbaria, state libraries, universities, government institutions, royal societies, naturalist clubs, and networks from around the country. Thanks to two new local grants, even more Australian contributors and content will be flowing into BHL in 2024. Learn more.
Technical Development
Interlinking BHL Data in the Wikimedia Project Ecosystem
In August 2023, BHL Data Manager JJ Dearborn published a white paper spelling out 25 recommendations to integrate more BHL data into the Wikimedia ecosystem and the global biodiversity infrastructure. The white paper, titled Unifying Biodiversity Knowledge to Support Life on a Sustainable Planet, sheds light on BHL’s crucial role as a member of the biodiversity informatics community and reveals a series of key use cases and big data challenges that, if addressed, could be opportunities to enhance global biodiversity data infrastructure. Learn more.
BHL is Round Tripping Persistent Identifiers with the Wikidata Query Service
In the Spring of 2022, the BHL Cataloging and Metadata Committee investigated the possibility of harvesting persistent identifiers (PIDs) from Wikidata as part of the group’s longstanding project to disambiguate and deduplicate author records in the BHL database. Along with the BHL Technical Team and Data Manager, the Committee devised an experimental data pipeline from BHL to Wikidata and back. In total, the BHL Cataloging and Metadata Committee was able to “round trip” 88,507 persistent identifiers (PIDs) associated with BHL Creator records. Learn more.
BHL Technical Development: Year in Review
In 2023, BHL’s Technical Team dedicated significant efforts to improve our data ecosystem, now comprising 61+ million pages of biodiversity literature. Last year’s Technical Priorities underscored BHL’s steadfast commitment to data quality by focusing on both upstream and downstream data flows. Notable milestones include delivering refined taxonomic data to researchers, implementing interface improvements based on user feedback, and forging data pipelines for existing and new downstream data consumers. Learn more.
Content Highlights
Illuminating BHL’s Dark Data: Citizen Scientists and AI Unlock Key Biodiversity Data in GBIF
In the face of climate change and environmental challenges, understanding and documenting Earth’s biodiversity is essential. Species occurrence data sourced from BHL provides insights into species distributions, behaviors, and interactions much deeper into time, offering key species baseline data required to effectively address the climate crisis. A team of researchers used theThe ornithological papers of William Brewster (1851-1919), held in the Ernst Mayr Library and Archives of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) at Harvard University, as a use case for building a data pipeline to extra, transform, and load species occurrence records into GBIF. Learn more.
Flora, Fauna, and Photography: Five Years of Digitising Content for BHL in Aotearoa
Celebrating five years as a contributing partner of BHL, staff at the Auckland Museum shared highlights from their unique collections, representing over 200 years of biodiversity knowledge. Their contributions include field notebooks, sketches, identification guides, records and proceedings, educational textbooks, plant material, cyanotypes (blueprints), and hand-painted illustrations. Learn more.
Travelling Plants: A Collaborative Project at Royal Botanic Gardens Kew
The archives team at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew developed a collaboration with the University of Roehampton, the University of the Third Age (U3A), and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), to create a model for the archive sector, which uses volunteer-driven, remote methods to transcribe and research collections, making them easily shareable and accessible using TEI-XML encoding. The Kew team selected an important item from their collections to use as a case study for creating this model. They digitized, transcribed, encoded, and made accessible in BHL one of Kew’s most important, but inaccessible volumes – the Kew Record Book. Learn more.
Ukrainian Українська Collection
BHL partnered with the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Library (NAL) to support biodiversity and scientific research in Ukraine with the release of the Ukrainian Українська Collection. The Ukrainian Українська Collection includes rare and unique titles covering biodiversity research in Ukraine over the past two centuries, including previously uncataloged material. These items have been selected for their cultural and scientific significance to the biodiversity research community, and include an array of topics from wheat production, agricultural economics, soil management, animal breeding, and rural electrification, to arbovirus ecology. Geographically, the material covers a range of areas, including the historic Bukovina and Bessarabia regions. Learn more.
2023 Collection Stats
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2023 Access Stats
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BHL Research Impact
Users often share how BHL, the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives, supports their research needs.
About the Biodiversity Heritage Library
As the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is transforming the way scientists, researchers, and librarians around the world access knowledge about and study life on Earth.
Natural history books and archives provide information that is critical to studying biodiversity. Replete with species data, ecosystem profiles, distribution maps, behavioral observations, and geological and climatic records, this literature underpins current scientific research and provides an historical perspective on species abundance, habitat alteration, and human exploration, culture, and discovery.
Through a worldwide partnership of natural history and botanical libraries, BHL provides free online access to over 62 million pages of biodiversity books and journals from the 15th-21st centuries. Additionally, BHL has made over 300,000 of the illustrations within its collection available on Flickr. Tools and services such as taxonomic name finding tools, custom PDF downloads, and open APIs allow users to easily locate and reuse these resources. BHL also supports a variety of volunteer opportunities that encourage the public to help enhance collection data.
Since the Library was founded in 2006, BHL has served over 14 million people in over 240 countries and territories around the world. In 2023, BHL averaged more than 246,000 visits per month, constituting over 30 million visits over the Library’s lifetime.
BHL would also like to thank our many generous donors from 16 countries who collectively made 100 donations, amounting to 17,358 USD, in 2023.
By engaging with the scientific community to identify user needs, incorporating tools that facilitate data discovery and reuse, and continuing to grow collections under open access principles by fostering existing and establishing new partnerships with libraries and data providers around the world, BHL has become an unparalleled resource that serves as a standard for taxonomic literature aggregation, discovery and presentation as well as a model for other digital library initiatives.