This incredible online collection of information is intended to improve research methodologies for scientists, visual artists, historians, and writers — but seriously, anyone anywhere can access this massive digital library — FREE!
Natursystem aller bekannten inund ausländischen Insekten Berlin, J. Pauli, 1783-1804. (Translation: … [+]
The world recently stopped and gazed in awe at the magnificent photographs sent back to Earth from the new $10 billion Webb Telescope. Thanks to this technological marvel, all of us can now gaze upon planets and stars and galaxies that we have never seen before, and that none of us will never visit.
But there is a strange and beautiful world that we can visit and, conveniently, it’s the one we’re living on right now. Earth. However, anyone who wishes to explore life on Earth and to catch a brief glimpse of its complexities should get moving before it’s all disappeared. Due to global climate change, the widespread loss of biodiversity is happening faster than any one human can catalogue. Further, most of the information about biodiversity is available in a very few books archived in a handful of libraries around the world. How can we access this material? How can we research what do not even know exists?
Thanks to the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), the citizens of the world now have a place to start investigating the world’s collective knowledge about its remarkable biodiversity. Although most of the information that is critically important to studying and better understanding biodiversity is archived in a very few libraries globally, now anyone in the world with an internet connection can access this material and its accompanying treasure trove of literature, maps, photographs, illustrations and more.
Trees as good citizens. Washington, D.C. American Tree Association [1922] (Image courtesy of … [+]
The BHL is the creation of a worldwide consortium of 19 natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries that are collaboratively digitizing the natural history literature in their collections, and making it freely available to those who want to learn more about life on Earth. To do this, the BHL consortium works with the international taxonomic community, publishers, bioinformaticians and information technology professionals to develop tools and services to greater online access, and reuse of content and data. BHL provides a range of services, data exports, and APIs to allow users to download content, harvest source data files, and reuse materials for research purposes.
Designed to address a major obstacle to natural history research, BHL provides access to official species descriptions and data, ecosystem profiles, distribution maps, inter-dependency observations, geological and climatic records, and more. Additionally, if you enjoy looking at catalogues of nature and natural history art, the BHL has amassed more than 319,620 images on their flickr archives, all of which are available under a Creative Commons license. (All the images that accompany this piece are, in fact, catalogued in their flickr archives.)
If you, like me, are particularly interested to access an online repository of information about Australian birds, animals, plants and fungi, there is a special node, Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) devoted to this very important bioregion. Launched in 2010, the ALA is currently being used to help assess the suitability of revegetation projects by determining species vulnerabilities to climatic and atmospheric changes.
The Eclectus parrot (Eclectus roratus) is a sexually dichromatic parrot native to the Solomon … [+]
Originally begun with just 300 volumes in 2006, BHL grew into the world’s largest largest digitization project for biodiversity literature by 2008. Currently, the BHL remains the largest such library in the world, providing free access to hundreds of thousands of volumes — over 60 million pages — published during the 15th-21st centuries. Since its launch, BHL has served more than 13 million people in more than 240 countries and territories around the world. Even today, BHL is demonstrating its unwavering commitment to open access in its goal to transform research on a global scale and to ensure that everyone everywhere has the information and tools necessary to study, explore and conserve the life on Earth.
