About

What is BLE?

The Biodiversity Library Exhibition (BLE) is a virtual exhibition of the digital content in the Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe. It is a dissemination tool which highlights specific biodiversity content and makes it accessible for a wider audience. The first two exhibitions will feature BHL-Europe’s content on “spices” and “expeditions”, presenting beautiful illustrations and informative text in old and rare books. It will also provide useful information for the visitor, e.g. recipes. The attractive design and easy to use interface of BLE has a great potential to show that historical literature on biodiversity can be interesting to a wide audience.

What is BHL-Europe?

The Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe (BHL-Europe)
BHL-Europe is a 3 year project, involving 28 major natural history museums, botanical gardens and other cooperating institutions.

The libraries of the European natural history museums and botanical gardens collectively hold the majority of the world’s published knowledge on the discovery and subsequent description of biological diversity. However, digital access to this knowledge is difficult. The objective of the BHL-Europe project is to make available Europe’s biodiversity information to everyone by improving the interoperability of European biodiversity digital libraries.

Furthermore, the project will provide a multilingual access point for biodiversity content through the BHL-Europe web portal with specific biological functionalities for search and retrieval and through the EUROPEANA portal.

The literature illustrations shown on this web site show some examples of the rich biodiversity material that we would like to make accessible to the world.

BHL-Europe is a Best Practice Network, funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus programme, as part of the i2010 policy.