| BHL-Europe – a portal for biodiversity literature 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 scientist such as Charles Darwin or 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 model, 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. By autumn 2010 a first version of the prototype will be accessible online. BHL-Europe and EuropeanaThe biodiversity community Portal will be linked to Europeana, the cultural website governed by the EDL Foundation. Europeana offers search capabilities through millions of digital items provided by Europe's museums and galleries, archives, libraries and audio-visual organisations. Some of these are world famous, others are as yet hidden treasures. Europeana will deliver access to over 10 million digital objects by 2010. BHL-Europe adds substantial added value to Europeana and it's users by making available a great amount of biodiversity literature and thus delivering the first major corpus of science material to Europeana. Expected results:
BHL-Europe and EDL FoundationThe Europeana Digital Library Foundation had been set up to develop a sustainable and secure future for Europeana. BHL-Europe will cooperate closely with EDL Foundation, by adopting best practices and standards and to ensure full interoperability. BHL-Europe will support European institutions in their national bids for funding for digitization of biodiversity material. In addition the project aims to attract new content providers. It will coordinate with Europeana, BHL global and national scanning projects to ensure material scanned by BHL-Europe is available through these portals. ContactsHenning Scholz, Project coordinator BHL-Europe project Subscribe to BHL-Europe newsletter at: www.bhl-europe.eu/newsletter.php Links
Partners
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- co-funded by the European Union
