“The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL is revolutionizing global research by providing free, worldwide access to knowledge about life on Earth.”
The BioDiversity Heritage Library publications are now available to search in iDiscover. The collection contains scientific monographs, magazines and journals from around the world providing access to over 55 million pages from the 15th to 21st centuries. The texts are fully searchable and can be downloaded.
The BioDiversity Heritage Library aims:
“To document Earth’s species and understand the complexities of swiftly-changing ecosystems in the midst of a major extinction crisis and widespread climate change, researchers need something that no single library can provide – access to the world’s collective knowledge about biodiversity. While natural history books and archives contain information that is critical to studying biodiversity, much of this material is available in only a handful of libraries globally. Scientists have long considered this lack of access to biodiversity literature as a major impediment to the efficiency of scientific research.
“BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to address this challenge by digitizing the natural history literature held in their collections and making it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.””
As well as providing access to individual titles the BHL also collates collections, such as:
Image credit: ‘n342_w1150’ by the BioDiversity Heritage library on Flickr – https://flic.kr/p/2dDg79B
Contributors to the Irish Times: Brian O’Nolan (right), aka Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen, with the writer, playwright and National Gallery of Ireland registrar John Weldon, aka Brinsley MacNamara.
