Biodiversity Heritage Library Adds Two Partners

Two new members have joined the Biodiversity Heritage Library: Cornell University Library (Ithaca, N.Y.) and the U.S. Geological Survey Library (Reston, Va.). These two institutions will contribute to the digitization of historical science literature in the BHL collections. All material will be online, free and available to the public.

Cornell University Library is one of the 10 largest academic research libraries in the United States. Within its 20 unit libraries, holdings number more than 7 million volumes and 7 million microforms. Particularly notable are Cornell’s History of Science collection and the entomology, beekeeping and historical agricultural collections housed at the Albert R. Mann Library, which serves the research needs of the agricultural, life science, human ecology and applied social science disciplines. For more information about the Mann Library, visit http://mannlib.cornell.edu/.

Created in 1879, the U.S. Geological Survey maintains one of the world’s largest libraries dedicated to the earth and natural sciences. Scientific research is a key part of the Survey’s mission, and this work is supported by a wide array of monitoring activities and scientific collections, more than 1,000 research scientists and a library with more than 2,000,000 volumes, 1,500,000 maps and 800 current serial titles. For more information about the U.S. Geological Survey, visit http://library.usgs.gov/.

Headquartered at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, the Biodiversity Heritage Library is the literature digitization component of the Encyclopedia of Life, a global effort to document all 1.8 million named species of animals, plants and other forms of life on Earth. BHL is a consortium of 14 major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries and research institutions. Its goal is to contribute to the global “biodiversity commons” by digitizing and aggregating the resources housed within each of the participating institutions, providing free and open access to the legacy literature that underpins the work of the natural science community. To further explore the BHL, visit http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/.

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SI-115-2012