Digitization Projects: Biodiversity Heritage Library Adds Adds University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as 16th Member

The wonderful (and open access) Biodiversity Heritage Library (based at the Smithsonian Institution) formally announced a new member yesterday, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).
UIUC is the the 16th member of the BHL consortium and will, “help identify and digitize historical science literature from its collections and add these to the BHL’s online holdings, where all materials may be accessed free by the public.”
From a BHL Blog Post:

“The Biodiversity Heritage Library is the preeminent global repository for historic science literature,” said Martin Kalfatovic, BHL program director and associate director for digital services at the Smithsonian Libraries. “The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has partnered from the start with the BHL and BHL members for many years and we are excited that we can formalize our partnership by welcoming them as our 16th member.”
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The Biology Library collection [UIUC] alone contains over 137,000 volumes and there are many more in related departmental libraries on campus, such as the agriculture, natural history, and rare book and manuscript collections.

The BHL presently provides access to:

• 77,183 titles
• 139,425 volumes
• 43,919,470 pages of legacy biodiversity literature.

Last month (May 2014) BHL added 24,389 pages.
All material is open access and searchable via basic or advanced search interfaces.

Along with search options you can also browse a selection of images from BHL via Flickr.
An list and RSS feed featuring new entries available here.
Two other recent members of BHL are:

• Washington University of St. Louis
• The National Library Board, Singapore (BHL Singapore)

BHL Regional Nodes

• Bibliotheca Alexandrina
• BHL-Africa
• Brazil (through BHL-SciELO)
• Atlas of Living Australia, BHL-Australlia
• BHL-China
• BHL-Europe

Filed under: Digital Preservation, Libraries, National Libraries, News, Open Access