S04 - BHL Africa: Assessing and Building Capacity for Global Access to Biodiversity Literature

The goal of this symposium is to share the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s (BHL) work on building capacity for digitization and open access delivery of biodiversity literature held in collections throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is an international consortium working together to make biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community.  Through its extensive network of Members and Affiliates, over 45 million pages of biodiversity literature are now available through the BHL portal.  Eight Global BHL Nodes work with institutions in their regions of the world to build capacity for digitization and to promote open access to the biodiversity literature. BHL Africa officially launched as one of the global nodes in 2013 with the vision of global access to biodiversity resources in sub-Saharan African institutions. Led by the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI), BHL Africa has subsequently begun digitization at some participating institutions and has drafted a governance framework for the node. JRS Biodiversity Foundation has recently provided generous funding to facilitate the growth of BHL Africa. Awarded to SANBI, this new grant will promote growth of BHLA through assessment, collaboration, and digitization. Assessments will include a survey of current members and potential partners, and site visits to Kenya and Uganda to establish capacities and collection profiles. This information will help inform training materials for a workshop on the selection of unique content for inclusion in BHL and selection of digitization service providers. This symposium will provide an overview of how BHL Africa fits into the global BHL consortium and the use of workshops for building capacity across BHL partners, including examples and lessons learned from the JRS-funded BHL Africa Workshop to be held the week prior to TDWG2015.