Partnership Digitizes Biodiversity Information

ACC has carried out decades of conservation research in different landscapes in Kenya. We have loads of published and unpublished works on Kenya’s biodiversity and preserving and making this information available to the public has been a priority for us. Thanks to a partnership with the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) Africa, we are digitizing these important biodiversity materials.

The purpose for digitization is to preserve information and facilitate access of rare and important publications on biodiversity. When books and documents are stored for a long period of time they are susceptible to damage from mold, pests (insects and rodents), light, temperature, handling, ink used to create the document and natural acids in the paper. ACC’s partnership with BHL will preserve our institutional documents and make this biodiversity literature openly available to the world through digitization. BHL’s digital library for biodiversity literature has more than 46 million pages from biodiversity literature, field books from the 15th to 21st centuries and more than 159 million taxonomic names found throughout the collection.

All the materials in the BHL are free to access, download and reuse and repurpose under the principles of open access and open data.

How to access information on BHL

• Visit www.biodiversitylibrary.org
• Search by title, author, subject or publication year
• You can submit requests for new titles that can be added to BHL Researchers, students, policy makers and tourists can find additional information about Kenya’s biodiversity on the Biodiversity Atlas Kenya web portal.