Case Study: Biodiversity Heritage Library boosts online engagement monitoring with Altmetric

Biodiversity Heritage Library tracks 10,000+ online mentions with Altmetric

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), a major online consortium providing free access to millions of pages of natural history literature, wanted to track and surface online conversations about its digital collections. As part of a grant-funded initiative to become a more social digital library, BHL sought to better understand audience engagement and make these discussions visible to its readers, a challenge difficult with manual tracking alone. They turned to Altmetric for its altmetrics service.

Altmetric implemented its badges and Explorer platform for BHL, tracking mentions based on content URIs across the vast collection. The solution allowed BHL to discover significant online attention they were previously unaware of, including over 10,000 mentions with a notable portion being Wikipedia references. Using Altmetric data, the team identified popular content themes like marine books, directly informing their outreach strategy to increase engagement and tailor future content.

Biodiversity Heritage Library