Smithsonian Institution Teams with Major International Natural History and Botanical Libraries to Digitize Biodiversity Holdings

Eight of the world’s major natural history and botanical libraries are working together to develop a strategy and operational plan to digitize the published literature on biodiversity that they jointly hold and make it freely accessible to all on the Web. The project, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, will establish a major corpus of publications drawn from each of their collections. Much of the published literature is rare or has limited global distribution and is available in only a few select libraries. From a scholarly perspective, these collections are of exceptional value because the domain of systematic biology depends—more than any other science—on historic literature.