Jump to content

GLAM/Newsletter/March 2026/Contents/Biodiversity Heritage Library report

Add links
From Outreach Wiki


Biodiversity Heritage Library report

Updates on work by BHL-Wiki Working Group members

By Ambrosia10

BHL Field Museum to host BHL Technical Infrastructure

The Field Museum looking north across Chicago

The BHL-Wiki community are celebrating the news that the Field Museum has agreed to host the BHL Technical Infrastructure. More information on this transition away from the Smithsonian Institution can be found in this BHL blog. Many BHL-Wiki working group members were equal parts delighted and relieved to receive this news.

Vanderbilt University’s Heard Libraries Joins BHL

More positive news has also been announced with this BHL blog proclaiming Vanderbilt University’s Heard Libraries is joining BHL and will be contributing cloud infrastructure expertise and technical leadership for BHL.

BHL Annual Meeting 2026

Siobhan Leachman (Ambrosia10) will be attending the BHL Annual Meeting in London. She was asked to prepare a document to report back to BHL Annual Meeting attendees on the effect of the transition BHL has been undergoing on the BHL-Wiki Working Group. She prepared the a summary set out in this document to be read by attendees prior to the meeting.

BHL Day 2026

Ambrosia10 and Sabine von Mering have also submitted and have had accepted an abstract to the public symposium BHL Day 2026 which will take place at the Natural History Museum, on Wednesday 29 April. They will be presenting on research they and their colleagues had undertaken on flowering plant genera named after women and the two research papers they and their colleagues published on their research. Wikidata was used to create the linked open dataset for all flowering plant genera whose names honour women.

Wikidata type specimen data model

Wikidata WikiProject Natural History Specimen Data Model

In 2024 members of the BHL Wiki working group raised the issue of the need for a Wikidata type specimen item data model. See this issue raised in the BHL-Wiki Working Group Github repository. This issue was the inspiration for work undertaken by two members of the BHL-Wiki working group Siobhan Leachman (Ambrosia10), Chair of the BHL-Wiki working group, and Brodie Satherley (Dactylantha) from Auckland War Memorial Museum (an affiliate of BHL).

Siobhan and Brodie created the WikiProject Natural History Specimen Data Model to document this collaboration and proceeded to propose Wikidata properties and create documentation for both a Wikidata type specimen item data model as well as a Wikimedia Commons data model for the structured data that should be attached to specimen images.

They have also created “how to” documentation for both data models, cross walks to the Darwin Core data standard for both models as well as a documentation for an example upload/creation of type specimen Wikidata items undertaken via OpenRefine. All the documentation produced has been shared on Zenodo to expose it to the wider Biodiversity community. The data models, crosswalks and “how to” documentation have also been shared on Wikimedia Commons.

Siobhan and Brodie are grateful for the feedback received from other members of the BHL-Wiki working group as well as the wider Wiki community.


Retrieved from "https://outreach.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=GLAM/Newsletter/March_2026/Contents/Biodiversity_Heritage_Library_report&oldid=276336"