Citizen Science

Biodiversity Heritage Library

Citizen Science

In citizen science, the public participates voluntarily in the scientific process, addressing real-world problems in ways that may include formulating research questions, conducting scientific experiments, collecting and analyzing data, interpreting results, making new discoveries, developing technologies and applications, and solving complex problems. In crowdsourcing, organizations submit an open call for voluntary assistance from a large group of individuals for online, distributed problem solving.¹

Biodiversity Heritage Library

The Biodiversity Heritage Library improves research methodology by collaboratively making biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community.² The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL is revolutionizing global research by providing free, worldwide access to knowledge about life on Earth.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) supports a variety of citizen science and crowdsourcing projects, from transcribing field notes to tagging scientific illustrations with taxonomic names on Flickr and enhancing data for 19 century periodicals through its Zooniverse-based Science Gossip project. Through a variety of outreach strategies including collaborative social media campaigns, partnerships with citizen science distributed under the terms of the CC0 Public Domain Dedication. communities, and interactive incentives, BHL has successfully engaged volunteers with diverse projects to enrich the library’s data and increase discoverability of its collections.³

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) collaborates across the international consortium and with community partners around the world to help enhance access to the biodiversity literature. Literature repositories, particularly the BHL collections, have been recognized as critical to the global scientific community. A diverse global user community propels BHL and BHL users to develop access tools beyond the standard “title, author, subject” search. BHL utilizes the Global Names Recognition and Discovery (GNRD) service to identify taxonomic names within text rendered by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, enabling scientific name searches and creation of species-specific bibliographies, critical to systematics research.⁴

150,000 illustrations are available to download.

At least 150,000 illustrations are available for free download in high-resolution files. Take a look at the Flickr stream: Biodiversity Heritage Library’s albums | Flickr

You can subscribe to the BHL Blog: Biodiversity Heritage Library – Program news and collection highlights from BHL

1. Citizen Science (website).

2. As of today (6/19 2023) the Biodiversity Heritage Library has open access to 185,233 titles;
296,607 volumes and 60,973,689 pages.

3. Costantino, Grace. “Outreach Strategies to Engage Citizen Scientists: Insights from the Biodiversity Heritage Library.” Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 2 (2018).

4. Rinaldo, Constance. “Introduction to the Symposium: Improving Access to Hidden Scientific Data in the Biodiversity Heritage Library.” Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 3 (2019).