Selection Process

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BHL Content Selection Process

The BHL content selection process has four approaches. These include systematic discipline-specific selection, selection based on user requests, and selection based on permissions granted by rights-holders. A fourth source of content for the BHL collection comes from an ingest of non-BHL partner institution content found in the Internet Archive. Materials in the BHL collection are subject to US copyright restrictions, meaning that materials selected for scanning must fall within the public domain or be permitted for inclusion by the express agreement of the copyright holder.

1) Discipline-specific selection

The BHL is a consortium of libraries, whose collections contain a wide range of natural history subject matter. At the project's inception, BHL consortium libraries selected content for scanning based on their collection's strengths. Institutions were assigned a scanning concentration based on a specific discipline, such as Entomology, Ichthyology, or Mammology, etc., or set of materials, such as natural history periodicals. At present, BHL scanning has progressed beyond the initial disciplinary approach to adopt a more targeted and patron-driven selection process.

The priority for BHL scanning going forward is to digitize the missing volumes or pieces of a title in order to provide the most complete set of materials possible.

2) User-requested material

The BHL selects a large majority of content for scanning based on user-submitted requests. On the BHL website, there is a feedback form which provides users with the opportunity to request items for scanning. These requests are processed in the order they are received and assigned to the BHL institution that owns the requested item. As it is often the case that the holdings of a single library cannot fulfill a user's request to completion, many BHL libraries must work together to send the materials for scanning. User requests are fulfilled barring any issues that may exist with the condition and/or size of the materials, copyright restrictions, rarity of the content requested, etc.

3) In-copyright materials with permission

BHL regularly receives permission from copyright holders to digitize in-copyright material. BHL libraries prioritize the digitization of materials where permission has been granted by the copyright holder over all other materials in the queue. Visit our Permissions page to learn more about the permissions process, or to find information about granting permission for BHL to scan any material for which you are the rights holder.

4) Incorporation of content from non-BHL libraries

The BHL supplements its collection by harvesting, or "ingesting", open access content from other digital library collections and repositories in order to acquire materials otherwise unavailable within the consortium of BHL institutions. The majority of supplemental materials are ingested from the corpus of digitized books available through the Internet Archive. Thus, selected materials scanned by the University of California Libraries and the libraries of the University of Toronto can be found in the BHL collection. These materials are identified with the description, "(archive.org)" as part of the <Contributing Library> data field.

Content harvested from non-BHL consortium libraries must conform to a pre-determined set of criteria where Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal call numbers are used to automatically identify biodiversity relevant materials. The initial criteria were identified and have since been refined by the BHL Collections Committee. The process of matching titles in the Internet Archive corpus against a fixed set of selection criteria based on subject headings and call numbers is not perfect and, occasionally, non-relevant materials are inadvertently incorporated into the collection. As the BHL collection continues to grow, the Collections Committee meets regularly to discuss issues related to non-BHL library ingested materials. If you notice an item in BHL that you believe is out of scope and should be removed, please let us know via our feedback form and the Collections Committee will consider the removal of the item. For more information on the deaccession of material from the BHL collection, please visit our Deaccession Policy page.

A caveat with material ingested into BHL according to this method is that BHL has a limited ability to resolve issues that may be discovered with these items. While we perform quality review on a statistical sampling of items scanned from BHL consortium libraries, we have no control over the quality review of items scanned by non-BHL institutions. Thus, there may be quality issues that we are unaware of. If you notice an issue with a non-BHL contributed or "(archive.org)" item, such as a missing page or poor scanning quality, please let us know via our feedback form. In many instances, we will only be able to resolve the issue if a BHL library owns the item and can send it for scanning. In this case, we will remove the Internet Archive-contributed item in favor of the BHL copy.

For more information on the ingest criteria process, please take a look at a presentation on the subject given by BHL's Collections Coordinator, Bianca Crowley.