The Biodiversity heritage library for Europe project (www.bhle.eu) began in 2009 and joins noteworthy European museum and botanical gardens, including some in the USA as well.
The primary goal of the project was to
create an indexed archival system for digitized scientific literature, and free
access to this literature via a multifunctional portal (www.bhl-europe.eu). The digital copies of
this literature are thus freely available to all, scientists and public alike.
The portal officially goes live today, March 18th, 2013.
Literature on the BHL-Europe portal comes
from numerous European and also some non-European institutions and their
libraries, and contains many unique items, difficult to access otherwise.
The web portal is available in 14 languages.
It is possible to search in the literature (monographs, magazines, various book
editions and professional journals) by using various features on the site, such
as by either scientific taxonomy or local (common) names and synonyms. The
results may then be viewed directly online, or downloaded as .pdf, text (OCR)
or images (.jpg). The portal offers many additional functions.
The BHL-Europe portal (and other
international sources) is linked to the Biodiversity Library Exhibition (BLE, www.biodiversityexhibition.com) platform, which publishes selected literature in
the form of interesting themes, information and an attractive design. Thanks to
the specific presentation of literature and interesting scientific items, the
platform has significant educational potential. The BLE platform was developed
by the National Museum as part of the BHL-Europe and OpenUP! projects, and is
constantly expanding.
The collected literature of the BHL-Europe
project is also presented on the Europeana portal (www.europeana.eu),
which makes available huge quantities of material from various European
collections (over 20 million objects). These objects encompass various types of
European cultural heritage items, such as architecture, history and art. Natural
history literature is on this portal mostly present by BHL-Europe, which can be
found at: http://www.europeana.eu/portal/search.html?query=*:*&qf=PROVIDER:BHL+Europe.
The release date of March 18th
was not chosen at random – the date coincides with the release date of the
American portal BHL US/UK/Australia (www.biodiversitylibrary.org/) in
its new user interface. BHL US/UK/Australia functions principally as an
aggregator of scientific literature in the USA, much like BHL-Europe does in
Europe. The portals currently differ in their function and content. Our
cooperative venture creates better access to scientific literature in a world
context, and functions as a digital literature archive. The joint release of
these two portals permits dissemination of this information in a much broader
scope, all over the world.
The BHL-Europe portal makes available 6,149
books containing one million pages from 92 content providers at the moment, but
this is just the initial offering. New material is added every day, and the
growth is projected to increase over time.
The goal of making this portal is a stable
and constantly-growing service for various scientific institutions, and
primarily for the public world-wide.
