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News
Featured Books
    All Featured Books
    Book of the Month Series
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Campaigns
    Fossil Stories
    Garden Stories
    Monsters Are Real
    Page Frights
    Her Natural History
    Earth Optimism 2020
Tech Blog
Visit BHL
  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
  • User Stories
  • Campaigns
    • Fossil Stories
    • Garden Stories
    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
  • Tech Blog
  • Visit BHL
Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts by Martin R. Kalfatovic

BHL News, Blog Reel

The Vast Library of Life: 15 Years of the BHL Portal

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It seems like we are on an anniversary splurge. In April, I marked my 10th year as BHL Program Director. Today is a more important date in BHL history. May 9, 2007 marked the official launch of BHL content on the web. We celebrated that day with one of our first BHL blog posts (Biodiversity Heritage Library and Encyclopedia of Life Launch!). On that launch date, BHL had 306 titles, 3,236 volumes, and 1,271,664 pages of taxonomic literature. Today, BHL has grown to become a global consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries and hosts over 60 million pages and more than 281,000 volumes.

Growing out of the vision of Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson for an “encyclopedia of life” that would provide a page for every species, BHL joined forces with a nascent Encyclopedia of Life in 2006. Under the guidance of Cristián Samper (National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution) and leaders from four additional cornerstone institutions (the Field Museum, Harvard University, the Marine Biological Laboratory, and the Missouri Botanical Garden), BHL served as the literature cornerstone of EOL. BHL and EOL received vital funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the switch was flipped on an important new player in the biodiversity landscape at a celebration hosted by the National Academy of Sciences.

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May 9, 2022byMartin R. Kalfatovic
BHL News, Blog Reel

10 Years of BHL Growth and Transformation While Program Director

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This month (April 2022) marks my tenth year as the BHL Program Director. Over the past 10 years, we’ve seen a lot of change — and a lot of growth — with the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Taking over from our first Program Director, Tom Garnett, was a daunting challenge. Tom led the initial funding of BHL through the MacArthur Foundation grant with the Encyclopedia of Life and the establishment of BHL as a global consortium.

Among my first tasks as BHL Program Director was to build on that legacy with the transition of BHL from a grant funded organization to a member-driven one. Likewise, those first months of my tenure saw the close out of the BHL Europe project (which led to our continued strong European presence) and the planning meetings (and later launch) of BHL Africa.

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April 27, 2022byMartin R. Kalfatovic
BHL News, Blog Reel

Supporting the Biodiversity Community: BHL Engages in Global Biodiversity Projects

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library thrives on international partnerships and collaborative projects. In the fall of 2021, representatives from BHL participated in a number of planning meetings and conferences in support of global biodiversity projects. Meetings included the BiCIKL hackathon, GBIF Governing Board Meeting, and TDWG 2021 virtual conference.

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November 10, 2021byConstance Rinaldo, Martin R. Kalfatovic and Colleen Funkhouser
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Farewell to Brood X (2021) — See You in 2038!

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By the time this post publishes, the vast majority of Brood X (2021) will have completed their above ground lifecycle. The vast numbers of adult Magicicada who first emerged in late April and early May will have disappeared, leaving behind their adult bodies as well as still massive numbers of exuviae (cast-off outer skins) from when they emerged as nymphs.

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July 13, 2021byMartin R. Kalfatovic
Blog Reel, Featured Books

The Magic of the Magicicada: Exploring Brood X Through Books in BHL

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On 10 May, I had my first sighting of this year’s periodical cicada in Northern Virginia. For seventeen years, three species of Magicicada, the periodical cicada (M. septendecim, M. cassinii, M. septendecula)[1] have been living about 61 cm (2 feet) underground beneath trees across portions of eastern North America. In May 2021, individuals in Brood X (sometimes known as the Great Eastern Brood) began to emerge in the trillions from their long sojourn when soil temperature reached a consistent temperature of 18 degrees C (64 degrees F) or higher.

The last time Brood X emerged was in 2004. For those who witnessed that appearance, or previous ones, Brood X at times feels like a science fiction movie with the creatures swarming and the loud (up to 90 decibel) mating song of the males drowning out conversations (I wonder how the rest of the world will react to our Zoom call being joined by singing cicadas!).

Magicicada are mostly harmless, neither biting nor stinging. Members of the order Hemiptera, the nymphs spend their underground life harmlessly consuming xylem fluids from the roots of deciduous forest trees; the adult female, which deposits its eggs in small slits cut into the ends of branches, rarely causes damage to mature trees and there is speculation that the cicada pruning leads to more abundant leafing and fruiting the following year.

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May 20, 2021byMartin R. Kalfatovic
BHL News, Blog Reel

2021 BHL Annual Meeting — Global and Virtual

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Like many organizations around the world, the Biodiversity Heritage Library was compelled, for the second year in a row, to move the 2021 BHL Annual Meeting to a virtual environment. In consultation with our prospective 2021 host, the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris, the BHL Executive Committee again made the difficult, yet necessary, decision to move to a virtual meeting, but one that would be much enhanced from 2020 with a goal of trying to recreate the interaction and programmatic content of our in-person meetings.

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May 6, 2021byMartin R. Kalfatovic
BHL News, Blog Reel

2020 BHL Annual Meeting — Global and Virtual

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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.

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June 16, 2020byMartin R. Kalfatovic
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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. Headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, D.C., BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”

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