ID: 613 / 184

Category: Symposia

Track: Pending

Proposed Symposium Title: BOTANICAL CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE BIODIVERSITY HERITAGE LIBRARY

Abstract: The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is an international consortium working together to make biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community. Through its extensive network of Members and Affiliates, over 50 million pages of biodiversity literature are now available through the BHL portal. Eight Global BHL Nodes work with institutions in their regions of the world to build capacity for digitization and to promote open access to the biodiversity literature. The BHL was created in 2006 as a direct response to the needs of the taxonomic community for access to early literature. Designed with meeting these needs, the BHL was grant-funded and quickly proved its value to its target users. The original BHL organizational model, based on US and UK partners, provided a template for, first, BHL Europe, and then a series of global nodes, most recently, BHL Africa, BHL Singapore, and BHL Mexico. As the BHL moved from project to a cornerstone of biodiversity infrastructure, sustainability, appropriate expansion, collaboration with national and pan-national digital libraries (Europeana, the Digital Public Library of America) became more important. With significant contributions from many of the major botanical garden libraries and related collections throughout the world, the BHL is an important tool in global botanical research. With deep connections to key botanical databases (e.g. Tropicos), the BHL has engaged the research community in tool development and content reuse. This Symposium will provide an overview of the BHL, outline key areas of botanical research functionality in the BHL, explore new areas of content in the BHL such as seed and nursery catalogs and field books, as well as highlight botanical illustrations and how to discover them in the BHL corpus.

Speaker 1: Martin R. Kalfatovic, BHL Program Director

Speaker 2: Bianca Crowley, BHL Collections Manager JJ Dearborn, BHL Data Manager Colleen Funkhouser, BHL Program Manager

Speaker 3: TBD

Topics (Up to three): Bioinformatics Literature Specimen citations

Topic 2: Education and Outreach

Topic 3: Systematics

Justification: This symposium will present advances in data exposure from the Biodiversity Heritage Library and similar platforms.