All posts by Martin R. Kalfatovic

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.

A promo video for the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Staff from the Biodiversity Heritage Library received the Outstanding Collaboration award from ALCTS on June 27, 2010.

So, as many of you may already know, BHL has gone global – way global, with BHL-Europe and BHL-China well underway, and a memorandum of understanding has just been signed with Australia. BHL and the Bibliotecha Alexandrina (for an Arab-language BHL) have had some preliminary discussions. Many of our BHL staff are currently in Vienna, Austria working with the BHL-Europe team to discuss project details and developments.