The LinBi project aims to enhance the discoverability of digitized objects from natural history collections hosted by institutes all over Europe. This enhancement is achieved by publishing new and enriched content to the Europeana collections platform. The use of simple vocabularies and machine-readable metadata encourages reuse and has the additional advantage of facilitating the clustering of interesting content for user groups beyond biodiversity and natural history researchers. Linking the collections of Europe together in an openly-available platform and sharing our common cultural and natural heritage with a broad audience will increase the public’s awareness of biodiversity collections. Furthermore, it will help us reach out to new user groups such as teachers, journalists and artists, who were previously unaware of, or distant from, our collections.<br> Suitable content was selected and harmonized for interlinking with Europeana. Contributions include a large quantity of herbarium sheets, digitized glass plate negatives taken between 1880 and 1930 and a portrait collection dating from the late 19th and early 20th century. With the help of the DoeDat crowdsourcing platform, existing metadata were enriched and mobilized to allow for publication in the form of open linked data.<br> The integration of geographical data and common names allows the Europeana platform to link scientific specimens with literature and fine art from different collections and to guide users to interesting and inspiring content via themed virtual exhibitions. One such theme is composed of content from the 'Wild Roses of Crépin' collection, which will be enriched by pictures of living plants, herbarium specimens and illustrations old and modern. A second content cluster consists of an enriched and curated collection of botanical illustrations originating from a corpus of special and rare books ranging from the 15th to 19th centuries. Careful curation increases the potential for re-use and provides additional oppertunities for the general public to interact with this collection.<br> The LinBi platform has the long-term ambition of forming a sustainable and open source solution integrated into the Europeana Core Service. This will further improve cooperation between institutes by building international infrastructure and networks, thus contributing to a more open cross-border society.
