BHL-Europe – Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe

The libraries of the European natural history museums and botanical gardens collectively hold the majority of the world's published knowledge on biological diversity. Today, this wealth of knowledge is not yet disclosed to the rest of the world while direct access and distribution is limited.

The BHL-Europe (Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe) project develops a multilingual portal, which will provide unprecedented access to more than 25 million pages of biodiversity literature. The unique collections include information on animals, plants, artworks and rare works by important scientists such as Charles Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt.

BHL-Europe addresses a number of key issues for access to digital content, namely, technical interoperability, metadata standards, adaptation of Europeana and BHL data models, workflow and harvesting procedures as well as best practices for rights' clearance and IPR management of biodiversity literature.

The Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, co-ordinates the project co-funded by the Community programme eContentplus. The BHL-Europe project mobilises 28 partners from 13 EU countries. BHL-Europe started 1 May 2009 and runs until April 2012. The public core release of the portal is planned for summer 2011.

Expected results

• A single, multilingual access point to the digitised collections of Europe's biodiversity literature (BHL)
• A global union catalogue of the partner libraries for content and digitisation management
• Agreement on common standards for the digitisation of biodiversity material in Europe
• Intellectual Property Rights Framework for BHL-Europe and agreements with Rights Holders
• Access to Europe's biodiversity heritage through Europeana

BHL-Europe adds substantial added value to Europeana and its users by making available a great amount of biodiversity literature and thus delivering the first major corpus of science material to Europeana.