Open access for natural history data


The Biodiversity Heritage Library is a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries cooperating to make literature available for open access.


It says valuable historic litera- ture can be inaccessible to many saying: “This wealth of knowl- edge is available only to those few who can gain direct access to significant­library­collections.” To address this the BHL consor- tium is digitising the public domain books and journals within their col- lections. The very visual contents


of the collections can be explored on­its­flickr­account­at­www.flickr.com/ photos/biodivlibrary/albums which holds more than 100,000 images. The BHL is aiming to publish a


Best Practices White Paper this month that will set out recom- mendations on the use of crowd- sourcing and machine learning to identify texts to correct and transcribe. The report will also look at user surveys – how to use feedback to inform the design of the site – and how to increase exposure through the use of Wikimedia.


December-January 2017/18


INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 13


NEWS pp12-13.indd 3


07/12/2017 16:48


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