BHL Europe

Recently  I traveled to Berlin, Germany to attend the final meeting of BHL Europe, which reached the end of its initial funding stream on April 30, 2012, and the Third Global BHL meeting (another post to come).  The BHL Europe project has come a long way and the international audience received a glimpse of the hard work that went into producing a Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe.  Why is this important?  Check out the Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe video.

Scientists have told us how important the Biodiversity Heritage Library is to their work--making information gathering so much easier and reducing the time it takes for them to complete their work.

The BHL Europe portal that is under development has some very impressive options.  I particularly like the book viewer, which can be seen here.  The BHL Europe portal also adds some features that would be nice to add to the current BHL portal like searching (and finding!) monographs, serials AND articles: view portal .  The taxonomic names feature, so important to BHL users, is also available in the BHL Europe portal.  The most impressive and exciting addition to BHL Europe is the Exhibition page.  Currently, there are exhibits about spices and expeditions.  Future exhibitions include poisonous creatures and the development of scientific illustration. The BHL Europe's collaboration with Europeana offers new ways to explore biodiversity-related data, including items not found in BHL such as photographs and cultural heritage objects.

And one of the highlights of the meeting was the reception in the Museum fur Naturkunde, enjoyed by all of us.  I feel privileged to work with these colleagues from many institutions all over the world.  Thank you to Henning and Anne-Marie Scholz for organizing this meeting to celebrate the success of the Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe.  May the collaborations continue to evolve.

 reception in the Museum fur Naturkundereception in the Museum fur Naturkunde