A Quick Look at The Bio­di­ver­sity Her­itage Library for Europe

From the Europeana Blog:

Bio­di­ver­sity her­itage lit­er­a­ture merges the line between art and sci­ence, assem­bling descrip­tions of species and other accounts with metic­u­lously crafted illus­tra­tions. While this lit­er­a­ture is of great sci­en­tific and cul­tural impor­tance, it is often very rare and dif­fi­cult to access.
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The EU-project ‘Bio­di­ver­sity Her­itage Library for Europe’ is ded­i­cated to solv­ing this prob­lem by mak­ing this type of con­tent easy to find. It aims to make the exist­ing dig­i­tal col­lec­tions of Euro­pean bio­di­ver­sity lit­er­a­ture freely acces­si­ble to any­one online. Both BLE’s mul­ti­lin­gual por­tal and the Euro­peana por­tal pro­vide instant access to this type of lit­er­a­ture, with over 100,000 objects now already avail­able through Euro­peana. More than any­thing, the BLE high­lights how bio­di­ver­sity her­itage lit­er­a­ture encom­passes art, sci­ence, cul­ture and his­tory — with trivia, sum­maries, diaries, his­tory, fan­tas­tic illus­tra­tions and even recipes.
On top of this the Bio­di­ver­sity Library has cre­ated an exhi­bi­tion space to high­light their con­tent, with two exhibitions. The first wel­comes you to the won­drous world of spices and their rep­re­sen­ta­tion in lit­er­a­ture. The sec­ond takes you on trip around the world, detail­ing some of the most famous and excit­ing expe­di­tions ever mounted.

Read the Complete Blog Post
See Also: The Biodiversity Heritage Library Adds Two Partners & Makes Some Content Available on iTunesU
This Biodiversity Heritage Library is headquartered at the Smithsonian Institution. Check out the new Citation Finder search option.
Biodiversity Heritage Library Collection Size (as of March 13, 2012)

• 54,214 titles
• 103,078 volumes
• 38,028,590 pages

Filed under: Libraries, Resources