Smithsonian Libraries Receives $1.5 Million from Seidell Fund

The Smithsonian Institution Libraries has received $1.5 million from the Smithsonian’s Atherton Seidell Endowment Fund. This award will support the Libraries’ participation in the Biodiversity Heritage Library Project for the next five years. The Seidell award will fund various BHL projects, including purchasing a high speed digital camera for the digitization of folio volumes and large foldouts, designing an effective digitization work flow to incorporate locally scanned materials into the BHL portal, subsidizing two library technicians for ongoing digitization and purchasing storage material for the potential rehosting of the Libraries’ and BHL content. In addition, the award will provide for increased scanning through the FedScan facility at the Library of Congress and onsite at the Smithsonian Libraries, as well as support a metadata technician to work on portal editing, bibliographic control and pagination to broaden the awareness and usability of BHL content.