The Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe (BHL-Europe) was a three-year (2009 - 2012) EU project aimed to the coordination of digitization of literature on biodiversity. It involved 28 major natural history museums, botanical gardens, libraries and other European institutions. BHL-Europe was founded in Berlin in May 2009 and regarded itself as a European partner project of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) project, which was founded in 2005 and initially formed by ten (since 2009, twelve) United States and British libraries.
BHL-Europe was a best practice network. Important components were the coordination of digitization and the creation of appropriate infrastructure, as well as the consolidation of various European digitization projects under a common centralized and multilingual BHL portal. The scope was to make available the digitized literature under Open Access and Creative Commons licenses, and to improve its searchability (using OCR).
BHL-Europe was also responsible for the creation of structures for long-term storage of digital information (durability of digital data).
The following 28 institutions functioned in May 2009 in Berlin as the founding members of the consortium of BHL-Europe:[1]