Wealth of biodiversity

 
Published: Sunday 31 August 2008

www.biodiversitylibrary.org

A person clicking on to www.biodiversitylibrary.org should be excused if he/she doesn't realize the importance of this site. One is presented with a jumble of various heads the site deals with. But that's a minor quibble. www.biodiversitylibrary.org actually has a wealth of information. The online library is a collaborative venture of ten institutions including the American Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum, Harvard University's Botany Libraries, the New York Botanical Gardens and the Smithsonian Institution.

The site is an ongoing project. The participating libraries have over two million volumes of biodiversity literature collected over 200 years. The 10 member libraries of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) now have over 1.124 million pages of key taxonomic literature available on the web. BHL aims to establish a major corpus of digitized publications on the web drawn from the historical biodiversity literature. This material will be available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global Biodiversity Commons.

Much of the published literature is rare or has limited global distribution. From a scholarly perspective, these collections are of exceptional value because the domain of systematic biology depends--more than any other science--upon historic literature. The "cited half-life" of natural history literature is longer than that of any other scientific domain.

Subscribe to Daily Newsletter :

Comments are moderated and will be published only after the site moderator’s approval. Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name. Selected comments may also be used in the ‘Letters’ section of the Down To Earth print edition.