The Ernst Mayr Library is pleased to work on collaborative projects with other institutions around the world thanks to generous funding from foundations, granting agencies and the Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL)
The BHL is an international consortium of natural history and botanical libraries, research institutions and museums with goals to inspire discovery and improve research methodology by providing free access to biodiversity knowledge. BHL is the foundational literature component of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) and also provides literature links for the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). BHL was initially funded by EOL through grants from the MacArthur and Sloane Foundations and is now sustained by partner institutions in the US, Canada, UK, Europe, Mexico, Brazil, China, Egypt, Singapore and Australia.
A recent grant to the Biodiversity Heritage Library, led by Constance Rinaldo of the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, will support a National Digital Stewardship Residency cohort through the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program. Five residents will work throughout affiliated libraries across the country on a collaborative project with the aim to enhance tools, curation, and content stewardship at the BHL. Partners in the program include the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago Botanic Garden, Missouri Botanical Garden, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and the Smithsonian Institution. Job description and planned projects can be found here.
Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL)
Awarded in October, 2015 to the New York Botanical Garden with partners Ernst Mayr Library and Missouri Botanical Garden, the goal of EABL is to increase the availability of biodiversity literature by seeking out content providers who may need assistance in digitization or deposit and negotiating with copyright holders for more current publications. BHL will work with the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to ensure metadata is available for ingest, thus broadening the prospective audience and enhancing accessibility to the literature of biodiversity. The National Leadership grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is grant number LG-70-15-0138-15
Biodiversity Heritage Library Field Notes Project
Over a two year period beginning in February 2016, the Smithsonian Institution will coordinate work of 10 institutions to digitize field notes, assign metadata and publish the field notes online through the Biodiversity Heritage Library and Internet Archive, with an emphasis on quality, quantity and closely related content. The award is from the CLIR Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives, funded by the Mellon Foundation.
Purposeful Gaming
The Missouri Botanical Garden and partners at Harvard University, Cornell University, and the New York Botanical Garden tested purposeful games by crowdsourcing OCR corrections to support the enhancement of content in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). The anticipated benefits include improved access to content by providing richer and more accurate data; an extension of limited staff resources; and exposure of library content to new audiences. Games were developed by Tiltfactor and funding was from IMLS LG-05-13-0352.