All posts by Martin R. Kalfatovic

BHL is one of the first key data sets that is being used in the test bed for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). Not sure what the DPLA is? Well, it’s a bold initiative to create a large scale digital library for the United States and the world.

As many of you know, BHL Project Director Tom Garnett officially retired on March 24, 2012.Tom oversaw the growth of BHL from the idea of coordinated digitization by Natural History and Botanical Garden libraries into a cooperative of fourteen US and UK members and global nodes in Europe, Australia, China, Brazil, and Egypt.

In case you didn’t know it, today, March 3rd, is Platypus Day (thanks to our friends at Phineas and Ferb). In this case, we’re celebrating the “semi-aquatic egg-laying mammal of action,” Perry the Platypus, but you might want to learn more about this amazing creature by following the links below.

William Ulate and I attended the Global Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) Content Summit at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s facility on Barro Colorado Island (BCI) in Panama. The meetings, 17-19 January 2012, brought together a group of current and planned world-wide EOL content providers.

On March 8-9, 2011, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) Institutional Council met at Smithsonian Institution Libraries in Washington, D.C. The annual meeting is held to cover issues related to governance of the BHL, prioritization of the work of the technical development team, and discussion of the ongoing sustainability going forward of the BHL. The BHL Institutional Council is composed of the directors, or their designates, from each of the twelve member libraries.

Chris Freeland, Martin Kalfatovic and Keri Thompson attended technical meetings related to the Biodiversity Heritage Library China node, November 15-17, 2010. The meetings, held at the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing) took place over three days and covered scanning workflow, operation of the Internet Archive Scribe machine, technical standards for ingesting BHL-China materials into the BHL portal site, and replicating BHL data on IB/CAS servers.