Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe



The Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe (BHL-Europe) was a three-year (2009–2012) EU project aimed to the coordination of digitization of literature on biodiversity. It involved 28 major natural history museums, botanical gardens, libraries and other European institutions. BHL-Europe was founded in Berlin in May 2009 and regarded itself as a European partner project of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) project, which was founded in 2005 and initially formed by ten (since 2009, twelve) United States and British libraries.

BHL-Europe was a best practice network. Important components were the coordination of digitization and the creation of appropriate infrastructure, as well as the consolidation of various European digitization projects under a common centralized and multilingual BHL portal. The scope was to make available the digitized literature under Open Access and Creative Commons licenses, and to improve its searchability (using OCR).

BHL-Europe was also responsible for the creation of structures for long-term storage of digital information (durability of digital data).

Composition of BHL-Europe
The following 28 institutions functioned in May 2009 in Berlin as the founding members of the consortium of BHL-Europe:


 * Museum für Naturkunde (Berlin) (project leadership)
 * Natural History Museum (London)
 * National Museum (Prague)
 * European Digital Library Foundation (Europeana)
 * Angewandte Informationstechnik Forschungsgesellschaft AIT (Graz)
 * Atos Origin Integration France (Paris)
 * Freie Universität Berlin
 * Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (AnimalBase)
 * Naturhistorisches Museum Wien
 * Oberösterreichische Landesmuseen (Linz)
 * Museum and Institute of Zoology, Polish Academy of Sciences (Warszawa)
 * Hungarian Natural History Museum (Budapest)
 * University of Copenhagen
 * Naturalis (Leiden)
 * National Botanic Garden of Belgium - Meise
 * Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren)
 * Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences
 * Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris) (Gallica)
 * Museum national d'histoire naturelle (Paris)
 * Spanish National Research Council (Madrid)
 * Università degli Studi di Firenze
 * Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
 * Species 2000
 * John Wiley & Sons
 * Smithsonian Institution (Washington)
 * Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis)
 * University of Helsinki
 * Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin