Presenters: L. Monda & A-L. Fourie – National Museum of Kenya & SANBI
Pretoria – The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives.
Anne-Lise Fourie addresses the forum on Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL): A source of big data and analysis #BIMFFBIP2019 pic.twitter.com/jEpHWM7hX2
— SA Biodiversity (@SANBI_ZA) August 20, 2019
It is a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries that cooperate to digitize taxonomic literature, hence revolutionizing global research by providing free, worldwide open access to knowledge about life on earth.
Lawrence Monda addresses the forum on Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL): A source of big data and analysis @lmonda #BIMFFBIP2019 pic.twitter.com/IslP54NXjA
— SA Biodiversity (@SANBI_ZA) August 20, 2019
So far BHL has digitised over 200 000 volumes of taxonomic literature and identified over 178 million instances of species names; it includes over 50 million pages of text with over 80 terabytes of data spanning over 500 years of data collection, which makes the BHL a rich source of biodiversity big data complete with taxonomic and bibliographic metadata.
The presentation covered types of data, access, and uses of that data together with a short introduction to BHL and BHL Africa