DPLA, Biodiversity Blog

On the 17th of May –

We had a very nice meeting with the people that are involved in setting up the DPLA (Digital Public Library of America). We hope that they might be able to profit from the lessons learned in setting up Europeana.

During the day one of the participants pointed me to the BHL blog, which does something similar to this blog and to the Europeana blog: highlight the sometimes beautiful, sometimes wierd and always interesting content that is available online.

BHL stands for Biodiversity Heritage Library, and they provide access to materials relating to Natural History. A clear example would be the extinct species like the Dodo – it is extinct now, only skeletal fragments remain. How did the contemporaries, the people that actually saw (and hunted and ate :-() the Dodo describe them?
But also historical descriptions of ecosystems and habitats are extremely important for example for research into climate change and the imapct on wildlife. And many natural history publications are very beautiful, with nice illustrations – not made for art sake, but with a function in conveying information – the ultimate infographics?

BHL content comes into Europeana through the BHL-Europe project, an EU-funded initiative to extend BHL with materials from the major European museums of natural history.

I would very much like to see more ‘content-oriented’ blogs from the projects and aggregators that we work with – and see people use that content in other non-project related blogs. If you are aware of blogs and other sites that regularly do that, please let me know. I’d be happy to link to them.