150K Nature Illustrations Spanning Hundreds of Years Are Now Free Online (vice.com) 9
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) has uploaded more than 150,000 images of biological sketches, some dating back to the 15th century, onto the internet. A report adds: They're all in the public domain, and free for anyone who wants them. The images are pulled from journals, research material, and libraries, altogether more than 55 million pages of literature. BHL is "the world's largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives," according to its website. On top of public domain content, BHL also works with rights holders to get permission to make copyrighted materials available under a Creative Commons license.
Re:Biodiversity Heritage Library? (Score:4, Informative)
To document Earth’s species and understand the complexities of swiftly-changing ecosystems in the midst of a major extinction crisis and widespread climate change, researchers need something that no single library can provide – access to the world’s collective knowledge about biodiversity. While natural history books and archives contain information that is critical to studying biodiversity, much of this material is available in only a handful of libraries globally. Scientists have long considered this lack of access to biodiversity literature as a major impediment to the efficiency of scientific research.
BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to address this challenge by digitizing the natural history literature held in their collections and making it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”
The BHL portal provides free access to hundreds of thousands of volumes, comprising over 57 million pages, from the 15th-21st centuries. In addition to public domain content, BHL works with rights holders to obtain permission to make in-copyright materials openly available under Creative Commons licenses.
The BHL consortium works with the international taxonomic community, publishers, bioinformaticians, and information technology professionals to develop tools and services to facilitate greater access, interoperability, and reuse of content and data. BHL provides a range of services, data exports, and APIs to allow users to download content, harvest source data files, and reuse materials for research purposes. Through the Global Names Recognition and Discovery (GNRD) service, BHL indexes the taxonomic names throughout the collection, allowing researchers to locate publications about specific taxa.
BHL actively engages with worldwide audiences using a range of social media tools and online initiatives. Through Flickr, BHL provides access to over 150,000 illustrations, enabling greater discovery and expanding its audience to the worlds of art and design. BHL also supports a variety of citizen science projects that encourage volunteers to help enhance collection data.
Since its launch in 2006, BHL has served over 8 million people in over 240 countries and territories around the world. Through ongoing collaboration, innovation, and an unwavering commitment to open access, the Biodiversity Heritage Library will continue to transform research on a global scale and ensure that everyone, everywhere has the information and tools they need to study, explore and conserve life on Earth.
Re: (Score:1)
How long until Getty claims it owns them? (Score:3)
Re:How long until Getty claims it owns them? (Score:4, Informative)
$1 Billion Getty Images Lawsuit Ends Not with a Bang, but a Whimper [petapixel.com]
Worth checking out! (Score:2)
I pokes around in this site for a while, and it's pretty cool. A lot of natural scientists of the time seem to have been pretty good illustrators, too.
Thanks (Score:2)
https://github.com/grantcarthew/data-stunning [github.com]
O’Reilly will be delighted! (Score:2)