Format: ORAL

David Iggulden

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, UK

17 years on from its official formation, the Biodiversity Heritage Librarys role continues to evolve, further increasing its relevance and demonstrating the collaborative resiliency of the consortium overall. BHLs global partnership of natural history, botanical and national libraries work together to develop the library and digitise their collections and make them freely available in BHL. As of November 2023, BHL has a total of 42 partners consisting of 19 Members and 23 Affiliates. As a Founder Member of the original project, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew has been a key member from the outset and is well placed to support the next stages of the resources development. Kews involvement with BHL provides an interesting case study overall, which illustrates how the BHL directly supports botanical research both within the organisation and across the globe. BHL provides an invaluable resource for work on plant nomenclature at Kew and has been a key partner in recent projects within both the Library and Archives and Economic Botany collections. BHL data is also being used to support the development of open science tools for taxonomy. It is for these reasons, plus the ongoing use by taxonomists that Kew continues to view BHL as essential to its mission to understand and protect plants and fungi for the well-being of people and the future of all life on earth.