GLAM/Newsletter/December 2025/Contents/Biodiversity Heritage Library report
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Updates on work by BHLWiki Working Group members
Transition update
The most recent blog updating the wider community on BHL's transition away from being hosted by the Smithsonian and towards independence has been published.
Like many GLAM related institutions, BHL is having to rely on additional sources of funding to sustain its existence. One of the major challenges during this transition is ensuring BHL's financial resilience. This blog discusses some of the actions take by BHL to attempt to achieve this.
Wikidata property proposals relevant to the BHL-Wiki working group
Brodie Hoare from the Auckland War Memorial Museum and Siobhan Leachman continue to collaborate on drafting a data model for type specimen Wikidata items and also a data model for Structured Data on Commons used on specimen images. The WikiProject formed for this collaboration can be viewed at this link. As part of this work two Wikidata properties that had been proposed by Brodie have been accepted. These are the collection date property and the specimen classifier property. Siobhan and Brodie continue to work on the proposed data model for type specimens and to map that model to the Darwin Core data standard terms. Documentation and workflows are currently being drafted and once complete will be open for feedback from the wider Wiki community.
Error report from the December 2025 BHL harvest of Author and Title identifiers from Wikidata
In December the BHL technical team again undertook their three monthly harvest of Author and Title identifiers from Wikidata. The error report of identifiers needing checking/fixing can be found here. Any help given to resolve these issues would be gratefully received.
A new GLAM joins BHL
In December it was announced that the University of Florida Libraries had joined BHL as a member organisation. For more information on this see this BHL blog post.
Improvements to the BHL2Wiki tool
Rod Page continues to make improvements to the BHL to Wikidata tool. This is a tool many in the BHLWiki working group use frequently in their editing workflows and as a group we are extremely grateful for Rod's efforts in maintaining and improving this tool.
