The museum is closed on Mondays.
Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe
The libraries of the European natural history museums and botanical gardens collectively hold the majority of the world's published knowledge on biological diversity. Today, this wealth of knowledge is not yet disclosed to the rest of the world while direct access and distribution is limited.
The BHL-Europe (Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe) project develops a multilingual portal, which will provide unprecedented access to more than 25 million pages of biodiversity literature. The unique collections include information on animals, plants, artworks and rare works by important scientist.
BHL-Europe addresses a number of key issues for access to digital content, namely, technical interoperability, metadata standards, adaptation of Europeana and BHL data model, workflow and harvesting procedures as well as best practices for rights' clearance and IPR management of biodiversity literature.
In the frame of the project, the Royal Museum for central Africa (RMCA) works in close collaboration with other Belgian partners: National Botanic Garden of Belgium (NBGB) and Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS).
The RMCA maintains an extensive library on African biodiversity, including the top scientific journals, but also a unique collection of rare, old colonial publications. RMCA combines the domain and library expertise with a strong expertise in biodiversity informatics and related IT issues which makes us ideal for the technological implementation of BHL-Europe.
The library of the National Botanic Garden of Belgium (NBGB) is one of the most important in Europe concerning descriptive botany. The library collects, catalogues and conserves complementary documentation to the herbaria and the living plant collections to serve staff as well as users from all over the world.
The scientific library of the Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences (RBINS) has a very rich collection of books (scientific and vulgarized) and about 7000 periodicals. There is also the famous Dautzenberg collection with rare volumes concerning conchology.
Contacts in the RMCA |
Patricia Mergen or Michel Louette |
Contacts in the RBINS |
Patrick Grootaert or Tine Mallaerts |
Contacts in the NBGB |
Régine Fabry or Nicole Hanquart |
- Expected results:
- A single, multi-lingual access point to the digitised collections of Europe's biodiversity literature (BHL)
- Agreement on common standards for the digitisation of biodiversity material in Europe
- Intellectual Property Rights Framework for BHL-Europe and agreements with Rights Holders
- Access to Europe's biodiversity heritage through Europeana
- Links
BHL: www.biodiversitylibrary.org
Europeana: www.europeana.eu
Europeana Connect: www.europeanaconnect.eu
Sterna: www.sterna-net.eu
Dismarc: www.dismarc.org
EDIT: www.e-taxonomy.eu
SP: www.sp2000.org
