All posts by Martin R. Kalfatovic

BHL member and affiliates met in New York City for the 2014 Annual Meeting (10-11 March 2014). The annual meeting is a chance for the leaders of BHL members and affiliates to learn what is happening around BHL and to give updates from their own institutions. This year, the meeting was held jointly by the New York Botanical Garden and the American Museum of Natural History. The first day of meetings was hosted by Susan Fraser, Director of the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden.

BHL Australia and the Melbourne Museum hosted “BHL Day” at the museum on 31 January 2014. Representatives of all the global BHL nodes (with the exception of BHL Egypt) were in attendance. BHL members were joined by staff and volunteers from BHL Australia as well as from the Atlas of Living Australia. The day began with Caroline Martin, Bunjilaka Manager at the Melbourne Museum who welcomed the group with a traditional welcome from the indigenous people of Australia. Tim Hart, Acting CEO of the Melbourne Museum gave a welcome to the day’s events.

Dr. Geoffrey Mwachala, Director, Research and Collection at the National Museum of Kenya, stopped to visit Martin Kalfatovic and Nancy Gwinn while in Washington on other biodiversity and museum collections business at the Smithsonian. While at Smithsonian Libraries, he was able to visit the scanning facility in the National Museum of Natural History and see some of the BHL digitization operations in action. Dr. Mwachala is a strong supporter of BHL Africa and the expansion of biodiversity knowledge.

Six members of the Global BHL community participated in the symposium, “Crafting the Future of a Global Biodiversity Heritage Library for Diverse Communities’ Needs” at the 2013 TDWG Conference in Florence, Italy. The symposium took place on 30 October 2013 and was attended by over 50 TDWG participants. A key portion of the symposium was the closing talk by Connie Rinaldo (Harvard/Museum of Comparative Zoology) which called for feedback on the BHL from the TDWG community.

We invite participants for an event that will pioneer the mining of the Encyclopedia of Life (http://eol.org) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org) to address outstanding and novel questions about the ecology and evolution of biodiversity. We aim to identify questions and data for which biologists may lack informatics skills and resources to address or analyze successfully; and symmetrically, to guide informaticians to pressing ecological and evolutionary questions.

The American Library Association 2013 Annual Meeting occurred in Chicago, IL, June 27-July2. BHL hosted both a poster and a presentation as part of the conference.

As noted in our blog post from March 22, 2013, BHL was named a 2013 Computerworld Honors Program Laureate.On June 3rd, BHL Chair Nancy Gwinn and I accepted the award on behalf of BHL and BHL staff at the Computerworld Honors Laureate Ceremony and Awards gala held in the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, DC.In addition to the presentation of the laureate medals, the event was keynoted by Vinton Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, and, truly, one of the “creators of the Internet.”