Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe
The Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe was a three-year EU project aimed to the coordination of digitization of literature on biodiversity. It involved 28 major natural history museums, botanical gardens, libraries and other European institutions. BHL-Europe was founded in Berlin in May 2009 and regarded itself as a European partner project of the Biodiversity Heritage Library project, which was founded in 2005 and initially formed by ten United States and British libraries.
BHL-Europe was a best practice network. Important components were the coordination of digitization and the creation of appropriate infrastructure, as well as the consolidation of various European digitization projects under a common centralized and multilingual BHL portal. The scope was to make available the digitized literature under Open Access and Creative Commons licenses, and to improve its searchability.
BHL-Europe was also responsible for the creation of structures for long-term storage of digital information.
Composition of BHL-Europe
The following 28 institutions functioned in May 2009 in Berlin as the founding members of the consortium of BHL-Europe:- Museum für Naturkunde
- Natural History Museum
- National Museum (Prague)
- European Digital Library Foundation
- Angewandte Informationstechnik Forschungsgesellschaft AIT
- Atos Origin Integration France
- Freie Universität Berlin
- Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
- Naturhistorisches Museum Wien
- Oberösterreichische Landesmuseen
- Museum and Institute of Zoology, Polish Academy of Sciences
- Hungarian Natural History Museum
- University of Copenhagen
- Naturalis
- National Botanic Garden of Belgium - Meise
- Royal Museum for Central Africa
- Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences
- Bibliothèque nationale de France
- Museum national d'histoire naturelle
- Spanish National Research Council
- Università degli Studi di Firenze
- Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
- Species 2000
- John Wiley & Sons
- Smithsonian Institution
- Missouri Botanical Garden
- University of Helsinki
- Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin