DUBLIN, Ohio, USA, 23 November 2010—The Biodiversity Heritage Library, the world's largest repository of full-text digitized legacy biodiversity literature, has added more than 14,000 records of digitized materials brought together from 12 prestigious institutions to WorldCat, making these items accessible to researchers through the world's largest resource for finding library materials.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a consortium of major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions organized to digitize, serve and preserve the legacy literature of biodiversity. BHL is the scanning and digitization component of the Encyclopedia of Life, a global effort to assemble information on all living species known to science into one ever-expanding, trusted, Web-based resource.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library will continue to send records to OCLC representing new titles scanned and added to their collection. The records link directly to the BHL Web site to access the full text.

"The libraries composing the BHL are delighted records for the important digital research assets managed by the BHL are available through WorldCat," said Thomas Garnett, BHL Program Director. "Making sure biodiversity literature is known to and available to scientists and teachers worldwide is part of our mission. A cooperative relationship with OCLC directly advances this key objective. Additionally, the metadata is now available for libraries to use locally through OCLC to integrate into their workflow. The OCLC team has been extremely supportive of our work."

OCLC continues to add records to WorldCat describing digitized and e-book collections of interest to the membership through partnerships with libraries, aggregators, publishers and mass digitization projects globally. There are currently more than 8 million records describing e-books and digitized books in WorldCat.

"The Biodiversity Heritage Library collects vital content from leading libraries and museums that OCLC member libraries want to make available to their users," said Chip Nilges, OCLC Vice President, Business Development. "OCLC looks forward to continuing this cooperative effort to ensure that this important collection is accessible to researchers worldwide through WorldCat.org."

Institutions participating in the Biodiversity Heritage Library include:

• Academy of Natural Sciences (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
• American Museum of Natural History (New York, New York)
• California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco, California)
• The Field Museum (Chicago, Illinois)
• Harvard University Botany Libraries (Cambridge, Massachusetts)
• Harvard University, Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (Cambridge, Massachusetts)
• Marine Biological Laboratory/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Woods Hole, Massachusetts)
• Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis, Missouri)
• Natural History Museum (London, United Kingdom)
• The New York Botanical Garden (New York, New York)
• Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (Richmond, United Kingdom)
• Smithsonian Institution Libraries (Washington, District of Columbia)

Prior to digitization, the resources housed within each BHL institution existed in isolation, available only to those with physical access to the collections. These collections are of exceptional value because the domain of systematic biology depends—more than any other science—upon historic literature. Consequently, the relative isolation of these collections presented an antiquated obstacle to further biodiversity investigation. This problem is particularly acute for the developing countries that are home to the majority of the world's biodiversity.

About the Biodiversity Heritage Library

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), the digitization component of the Encyclopedia of Life, is a consortium of 12 major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions organized to digitize, serve, and preserve the legacy literature of biodiversity. The European Commission's eContentPlus program has recently funded a BHL-Europe project, with 28 institutions, to assemble the European language biodiversity literature. The BHL has signed a Memoranda of Understanding with the following global partner projects:

1. The Chinese Academy of Science to establish a BHL-China.
2. The Atlas of Living Australia and the Museum Victoria to establish a BHL-Australia.
3. The Bibliotecha Alexandrian to establish an Arab Language BHL.

Negotiations are being pursued with institutions in Brazil for a BHL-South America. These projects will work together to share content, protocols, services and digital preservation practices.

About OCLC

Founded in 1967, OCLC is a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world's information and reducing library costs. More than 72,000 libraries in 171 countries have used OCLC services to locate, acquire, catalog, lend, preserve and manage library materials. Researchers, students, faculty, scholars, professional librarians and other information seekers use OCLC services to obtain bibliographic, abstract and full-text information when and where they need it. OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, the world's largest online database for discovery of library resources. Search WorldCat.org on the Web. For more information, visit the OCLC Web site.