Biodiversity Heritage Library: Expanding Library Impact through Open Access Digitization

"As a participant in BHL Singapore, the SBG Library is not only digitizing its collections for BHL, but the Gardens also hosted the BHL Open Day this past March as part of the 2017 BHL Annual Meeting festivities. During the event, local researchers spoke about the impact that open access to biodiversity literature through BHL has on their research.

'We believe that by sharing important collections in BHL and allowing free digital access to such materials, we will greatly assist researchers in furthering their own research on biodiversity in the Southeast Asian region,' affirms Abdul Karim. 'Information inequality between developing and developed world researchers can be narrowed with the availability of open access digital repositories.' Content digitized by SBG Library to date includes the Gardens' Bulletin as well as registers of the plants and seeds acquired by the Gardens. In the future, the Library plans to contribute unique field notes from the Gardens' collections, including those by orchid botanist Cedric Errol Carr, which are currently being transcribed as part of The Citizen Archivist Project at the National Archives of Singapore."