BHL-headquarter & BHL-China Workshop Held in Beijing

"Exchange, sharing and mirroring cooperation," Biodiversity Heritage Library (hereinafter referred to as BHL) is always committed to comply with the philosophy while carrying out work. Mr. Thomas GARNETT, general director of BHL, Mr. Christopher D. FREELAND, director of Center for Bioinformatics of Missouri Botanical Garden and the technical director of BHL, Mr.

Philipe CRYER, technical developer of BHL and Ms. Catherine N. NORTON, director of the Library of the United States Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the working group of BHL-China (BHL-China) held a workshop recently on the project progress, technical details and modalities for cooperation on invitation of the Biodiversity Committee of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Prof/Dr. JI Li-Qiang of the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences took part in the workshop.

Thomas GARNETT stressed that BHL was composed of a number of special libraries, but by no meant a simple digital library project. Dr. XU Zheping, technical director of BHL-China working group and director assistant of the Documentation and Information Center of the Institute of Botany, CAS, presented the architecture and the current status of BHL-China.

At present, the core and key framework of BHL-China has been completed and the documentation collection as well as the extraction of entry from the scanned literature have also being carried out smoothly. Up to the end of 2009, 225 books, 127,021 pages, 130,910 Chinese name-Page records and 129,105 Latin name Page records had already been online on BHL-China site.

Ms. Catherine NORTON depicted the whole literature scanning workflow from her own practical experience of cooperation with the Internet Archive. Catherine Norton said that the mature techniques, professional equipments and rich experiences provided a solid guarantee to restore the historical literature with high quality. Catherine NORTON also systematically introduced the copyright issue of several major member countries and areas of BHL and currently widely-used Creative Commons protocol.