All posts from June 2020

Ten years ago in June 2010, the Atlas of Living Australia and Museums Victoria signed an agreement with the Biodiversity Heritage Library – and BHL Australia was born.

BHL Australia’s mission is to make Australia’s biodiversity literature freely accessible and discoverable. Ten years ago, we started with a single contributing organisation, Museums Victoria, and a team of five incredibly dedicated volunteers. 

Over the past 10 years, BHL Australia has grown considerably. Our operation is still hosted by Museums Victoria (at the Melbourne Museum), but we now digitise literature (and ingest born-digital material) on behalf of 27 organisations across the country. 

We are now a truly national project, representing Australia’s state and territory museums, herbaria, royal societies and field naturalists clubs, as well as government agencies and natural history publishers. Together these organisations have contributed more than 350,000 pages from over 2,400 volumes.

Widely known as the “Peanut Man”, George Washington Carver is a famous historical figure in the world of agriculture. His work with peanuts is the first thing many learn about him in grade school, and indeed he popularized an underused versatile legume. He also worked extensively with sweet potatoes, soybeans, tomatoes, and much more. However, he sought to do more than highlight particular foodstuffs. He was interested in creating social change through agriculture, and thoughtfully caring for the soil that would bring about this change. Carver sought to encourage sustainable farming practices, move nature education outside the classroom, and improve the livelihoods and economic security of poor Black farmers in the South. Somewhere in the enticing history of peanut farming we lose the knowledge of his passion for conservation; Carver was instrumental in highlighting the need for agriculture to be intertwined with ecology.

Like many organizations around the world, the Biodiversity Heritage Library was compelled to move the 2020 BHL Annual Meeting to a virtual environment. In consultation with our prospective 2020 hosts, the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris, the BHL Executive Committee made the difficult, yet necessary, decision on 11 March 2020 to move to a virtual meeting rescheduled from April to May.

The 2020 BHL Virtual Annual Meeting was conducted over the course of May 2020. The Executive Committee and Secretariat staff provided pre-recorded video presentations which were made available to the BHL partner community in early May. Three video calls were hosted at various time zones in mid- to late-May to allow for the widest participation and the least inconvenience for partners. These three calls brought together 38 participants from 24 institutions and organizations, representing eight countries, and provided an opportunity for interaction and discussion even while separated by (in some cases great) distances.