Biodiversity Heritage Library: a global open repository

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

General Track, 24x7 Presentations

The session was recorded and is <a href="https://connectpro.helsinki.fi/p62pi1y2m49/">available for watching</a> (this presentation starts at 0:36:20)

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) works collaboratively to make biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community. A consortia of natural history and botanical libraries, through the application of multiple strategies and tools the BHL has created an effective and collaborative, multi-institutional virtual organisation to support the growth and development of the repository. Largely driven from the ground up, and without any institutional mandate, the BHL has successfully and organically fostered an organizational model that has encouraged innovation, user engagement, and global expansion. However, despite having a critical mass of content that is freely available to the public, we cannot assume the BHL will be widely and effectively used. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how digital library resources require contextualization, innovation and management of the information to expand to audiences beyond a core constituency.