Attendees at the 2013 BHL Institutional Council Meeting. Back Row, Left to Right: Martin Kalfatovic (BHL Program Director); Marty Schlabach (Mann Library, Cornell University); Judy Warnement (Harvard University Herbarium); William Ulate (BHL Technical Director); Diane Rielinger (MBL-WHOI); Tom Baione (American Museum of Natural History). Front Row, Left to Right: Bianca Crowley (BHL Collections Coordinator); Susan Fraser (the New York Botanical Garden); Nancy Gwinn (Smithsonian Libraries); Connie Rinaldo (Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology); Grace Costantino (BHL Program Manager); Jane Smith (Natural History Museum, London).

The seventh annual BHL Institutional Council Meeting occurred at the Marine Biological Laboratory and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute Library (MBL-WHOI) in Woods Hole, MA, on May 6-7, 2013.

The BHL Institutional Council is composed of the directors (or designated alternative representatives) of the BHL member libraries. The annual meetings serve as an opportunity for council members to provide updates about BHL activities at their institutions, discuss governance issues, make funding decisions, and strategize about the future of BHL. It also allows BHL Administrative Staff to inform council members about developments in their areas of expertise.

Representatives from eight member libraries were able to attend the meeting in person, and, for the first time in IC Meeting history, those who could not be present physically were able to virtually join the meeting using video conference software available within the MBL-WHOI library. Representatives from California Academy of Science, the Field Museum Library, and our newest BHL member, The Library of Congress, participated in a virtual capacity throughout the meeting. As part of the meeting, each representative gave updates on the BHL activities that occurred at their institutions over the past year.

Hard at work at the 2013 BHL IC Meeting!

Day one of the meeting began with a BHL Program Director update, provided by Martin R. Kalfatovic, discussing project developments and achievements.

Also during day one, William Ulate, BHL Technical Director and Global Coordinator, detailed BHL’s work in the past year, highlighting the implementation of the new user interface, work to date on the Art of Life  project, and the status of BHL’s six global nodes. BHL Program Manager, Grace Costantino, also provided an update on BHL’s outreach activities, including the presentation of a new BHL Outreach and Communication plan. Finally, Bianca Crowley, BHL Collections Coordinator, outlined her recent work and that of the BHL Collection’s Committee, including an overview of collection analysis needs and a new Permissions Plans which proposes a strategy for obtaining and fulfilling agreements with publishers to scan in-copyright content for BHL.

The BHL Business Meeting occurred on day two. Topics covered included approval of the 2013 budget, discussion of a new proposed member library organizational structure for BHL, and brainstorming about fundraising options to achieve financial sustainability. One final topic of discussion was a review of a proposed revision to BHL’s vision and mission statements:

Vision

“Inspiring discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge.”

Mission

“The Biodiversity Heritage Library works collaboratively to make biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community.”

As always, these meetings serve as a valuable opportunity to bring together BHL’s geographically dispersed leadership in order to make important decisions about BHL’s future. The decisions reached at this meeting promise to ensure continued positive growth and prosperity. We look forward to the ninth annual meeting next spring.

See presentations from the meetings by:

• Martin Kalfatovic, BHL Program Director: Presentation
• Grace Costantino, BHL Program Manager: Presentation One | Presentation Two
• Bianca Crowley, BHL Collections Coordinator: Presentation One | Presentation Two

* Photo Credits: Martin Kalfatovic, BHL Program Director

BHL-Africa logo at Pretoria National Botanical Garden

On April 15, 2013, BHL-Africa officially launched. BHL-Africa’s mission is to provide open access to the valuable biodiversity literature found within African libraries and institutions. The African consortium is hard at work identifying partners throughout the continent to sign an MOU and commit to working towards this noble objective.

The three-day BHL-Africa launch and workshop was hosted by the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) at the Pretoria National Botanical Garden in Pretoria, South Africa, from April 15-17, 2013. The meetings occurred simultaneously with the GBIF meetings also held at the botanical garden last week. Over two dozen representatives from institutions that have either signed or intend to sign the BHL-Africa MOU were present. Additionally, six colleagues from the BHL-US/UK program node were invited to attend: Nancy Gwinn (Director, Smithsonian Libraries, BHL Executive Committee Chair); Constance Rinaldo (Director, MCZ-Harvard Library, BHL Executive Committee Vice-Chair); Doug Holland (Director, Missouri Botanical Garden Library); William Ulate (Missouri Botanical Garden, BHL Technical Director); Bianca Crowley (Smithsonian Libraries, BHL Collections Coordinator); and Grace Costantino (Smithsonian Libraries, BHL Program Manager).

Monday, April 15, began with a launch ceremony, detailed in our blog post last week, during which the BHL MOU with SANBI was signed by Dr. Nancy Gwinn and Dr. Tanya Abrahamse (SANBI CEO). The real work began after the launch, with the start of the BHL-Africa workshop.

Dr. Nancy Gwinn and Dr. Tanya Abrahamse sign the BHL-Africa MOU

Day one of the workshop (Monday, April 15, afternoon) was devoted to addressing final MOU questions and outlining participants’ expectations for the meeting. Key expectations and areas in need of discussion included: Clarifying BHL’s open access policy and its implications for African participants; a concise description of the value of BHL for participating institutions in order to secure managerial buy-in; organization of clear fundraising strategies; the need for extensive training; identification of available resources and digitization capacity building; and the best way to collaborate and share resources amongst participating members. Overall meeting expectations were to elect a BHL-Africa Steering Committee and establish an outline for a two-year work plan.

The BHL-Africa Group Photo!

Much of day two (Tuesday, April 16) was spent investigating workflow and organizational questions, including collections development, copyright, communication, and infrastructure. The primary reason for the presence of the BHL-US/UK team was to offer our African colleagues the expertise we have gained in these areas over the past six years, as well as to help define global expectations for our new members.

Towards this end, Nancy Gwinn began by identifying four main expectations for BHL-Africa: Content Creation; Audience Building; Content Identification; and Partnership Building. In short, these expectations translate to not only growing the BHL corpus by digitizing African collections, but also helping BHL identify content to scan, both within and outside of Africa. Furthermore, BHL Africa must work to both build the BHL audience by promoting the project throughout the continent, but also expand the BHL consortium by identifying institutions that can contribute to the initiative.

Constance Rinaldo then gave a presentation on copyright, defining public domain, open access, and the Creative Commons licenses employed by BHL-US/UK. She was quick to stress, however, that each BHL node and institution must follow the copyright laws of their own countries, and, as BHL is not a legal entity, it is ultimately each scanning institution that is legally responsible for the content they contribute to the collection.

Bianca Crowley on BHL Collections Development

Bianca Crowley then gave our African colleagues some insight into the BHL-US/UK collection development process, outlining our selection and de-duplication process, digitization principles, metadata requirements, and content integration. Communication and collaboration methods were a key point of discussion, as they are critical for successful collections development.

Grace Costantino followed with a presentation on BHL-US/UK’s use of social media, which allows us to communicate project developments, provide context to the books in our collection, reach new audiences on new platforms, and uncover hidden gems in our collection. Following the presentation, an open discussion about each institution’s current use of social media, social media in the context of Africa, and how BHL-Africa might use social media occurred.

Finally, William Ulate detailed the BHL infrastructure, demoing the Macaw tool developed by Joel Richard at the Smithsonian Libraries, which is used to ingest books through Internet Archive into BHL. A remote installation of Macaw is running at the University of Pretoria and can be accessed via the web by any BHL-Africa participant to load digitized content into BHL.

BHL-African participants were also given a chance, on day two, to break out into two working groups, dedicated to Collections Development/Copyright and Outreach/Communication. These sessions allowed participants to apply the information given during the presentations to the realities of the BHL-Africa project.

The final day of the meeting (Wednesday, April 17) was spent identifying preliminary tasks for a two-year BHL-Africa workplan and electing a BHL-Africa Steering Committee. Workplan components include establishing a list of titles that each institution wishes to contribute to BHL; drafting documentation, based largely on existing files from gBHL, for workflow and collaboration guidance; and drafting a preliminary communication and outreach plan, which addresses not only external, but also internal, communication needs.

BHL-Africa Steering Committee (Left to Right): Lawrence Monda (Technical Advisor), Ashah Owano, Loi Namugenyi, Anne-Lise Fourie, Ria Groenewald

The BHL-Africa Steering Committee was also elected at the meeting. BHL-Africa has been divided into three regional nodes: North/Central; Eastern; Southern. Each regional node elects two representatives for the Steering Committee. Currently, there is no representation in North/Central Africa within the project, so only four members (two from Southern, two from Eastern) were elected at the meeting. Elected members include: Anne-Lise Fourie (SANBI, Southern); Ria Groenewald (University of Pretoria, Southern); Ashah Owano (National Museums of Kenya, Eastern); and Loi Namugenyi (Uganda National Council for Science and Technology, Eastern). Lawrence Monda (National Museums of Kenya) was elected as the BHL-Africa Technical Representative. Two additional members will be elected as North/Central institutions are added to the BHL fold. The Steering Committee will be responsible for providing strategic guidance, developing fundraising plans and approving budgets, and organizing pan-continental efforts.

The three-day BHL-Africa launch and workshop was an extremely successful event which resulted in the creation of an actionable plan for project development and the identification of notably capable leadership. Meeting attendees left feeling energized, with a clear sense of purpose. Just one and a half years ago, at the Life and Literature conference, the concept of BHL-Africa was born. Today, it is a reality. We congratulate our colleagues on the astounding progress they have made and look forward to seeing great things from BHL-Africa!

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is pleased to announce that it will serve as a digital content hub within the Digital Public Library of America. The DPLA pilot project, which combines and centralizes links to the collections of participating cultural institutions, launches April 18 in Boston.

As a result of BHL’s participation as a digital content hub, links to over 111,000 BHL volumes will be available within the DPLA portal. Through the DPLA, the Biodiversity Heritage Library will collaborate with renowned libraries, universities, archives and museums to reach a wide national audience.

“The Biodiversity Heritage Library is excited to be part of the Digital Public Library of America and to provide an important body of literature that will support the important mission of providing openly available scientific publications,” said Martin Kalfatovic, BHL Program Director.

Kalfatovic served, along with founding BHL Technical Director Chris Freeland, as first co-chairs of the DPLA’s Technical Aspects Workstream.

“We are thrilled to have the Biodiversity Heritage Library as a Content Hub,” said Emily Gore, DPLA Director for Content. “The BHL shares the DPLA’s commitment to open access and global data sharing, and brings rich biodiversity collections from a number of natural history and botanical libraries to the DPLA.”

About the Digital Public Library of America

The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science. The DPLA aims to expand this crucial realm of openly available materials, and make those riches more easily discovered and more widely usable and used. More information is online at http://dp.la. To find out more about the DPLA launch, April 18-19 in Boston, visit http://dp.la/get-involved/events/launch/.

On February 22, 2013, we announced that the Library of Congress (LoC) had become the fifteenth member of BHL! As a Steering Committee member, Library of Congress will help us further build the BHL collection by digitizing books in their vast library of over 151 million items.

Becoming a BHL member involves not only dedicating staff and financial resources, but also the signing of an official Memorandum of Understanding. On Thursday, March 28, 2013, Nancy Gwinn (Chair of the BHL Executive Committee and Director of Smithsonian Libraries), Grace Costantino (BHL Program Manager), and Elizabeth O’Brien (Smithsonian Libraries Director of Marketing and Special Events) visited the Library of Congress for a ceremonial signing of the MOU with Roberta Shaffer (Associate Librarian for Library Services, LoC) and Leslie Girard (Confidential Assistant to the Associate Librarian for Library Services, LoC).

Roberta Shaffer (right) signing BHL MOU for LoC with Nancy Gwinn (left). Photo by Elizabeth O’Brien.

So, we’re pleased to say that everything is signed, sealed, and official! We’re so excited to call Library of Congress a partner in our great endeavor to make the world’s biodiversity literature available freely to everyone, everywhere!

And of course, it takes a village to successfully build, maintain, and manage BHL. Each new member must dedicate staff to that village. Learn more about Library of Congress’s representative to BHL, Dr. Tomoko Steen, in our previous blog post. She will coordinate workflows and identify staff to help bring LoC material into our collection of over 40 million open access pages.

Curious to know who else is a BHL member? Check out our BHL membership page.