Biodiversity Heritage Library/About
ABOUT
The Biodiversity Heritage Library's collaboration with Wikimedia projects is in response to urgent calls from the scientific community, forecasting imminent global environmental crises by 2035. Driven by its commitments to the Biodiversity Commons and global welfare, BHL embarks to unlock and make actionable over 60 million pages spanning the 15th to the 21st centuries. Recently, BHL's data management strategies have evolved to embrace automation, crowdsourcing, and the semantic web. To this end, Wikimedians emerge as a vital collaborators. Serving as a global information broker, the Wikimedia project ecosystem is facilitating the semantic enrichment and rapid dissemination of 2 gigabytes of structured metadata, 40 gigabytes of OCR text, and 120 terabytes of images held within the BHL corpus. The dedicated members of the BHL-WIKI working group are comprised of a global cohort whose expertise in user experience, semantic ontologies, MediaWiki platforms, GLAM database repository systems, and data modeling, are crucial for advancing the conversion of BHL's legacy data into a computationally usable resource, and expanding global access to biodiversity knowledge for all.
BHL-WIKI GOALS
Strategic goals of the BHL-WIKI working group collaboration are to:
- Maximize the accessibility and interoperability of biodiversity data through semantic web integration and 5-star open data, FAIR, and CARE Data Principles
- Advance data modeling work to support global challenges
- Strengthen user experience, engagement, and global partnerships
Through advocacy and implementation of semantic web technologies, the working group endeavors to integrate insights from diverse global communities. By catalyzing the transformation of legacy data into modern web-friendly formats, documenting data models for unsurfaced named entities, spearheading global data literacy initiatives, and forging robust global partnerships, the group is committed to supporting the sustainable management of Earth's biodiversity and promoting universal bioliteracy for all.
BHL MISSION & HISTORY
Established in 2006 as a consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries, BHL began as a thematic technology project focussed on digitizing natural history literature held in parter collections democratize access to knowledge about life on Earth. Today, BHL has evolved to the world's largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL has expanded its scope from mass digitization to become a cornerstone data provider for the global biodiversity community and now encompasses not only legacy published literature but also modern scholarly articles, scientific field notes, correspondence, and gray unpublished material. With over 60 million pages and 500 years of data, BHL serves as a vital resource for researchers worldwide, driving transformative research on a global scale. Through ongoing collaboration, innovation, and unwavering commitment to open access, BHL continues to shape the landscape of biodiversity conservation and research, ensuring that everyone, everywhere has the information and tools they need to study, explore, and conserve life on Earth.