All posts by Martin R. Kalfatovic

On 17 June 2014, a visiting delegation of librarians from across Russia visited Smithsonian Libraries and our BHL operations.

Dr. Patricia Mergen, Liaison Officer,  Legal Entity Appointed Representative (LEAR) at the European Commission, Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium, visited the BHL Secretariat and Smithsonian Libraries on 31 May 2014. Mergen was in Washington to attend the Catalogue of Life Workshop and  Symposium (2-4 June 2014). In discussions with Program Director Martin Kalfatovic and Program Manager Carolyn Sheffield, Mergen gave updates on activities of BHL Europe and upcoming European biodiversity initiatives, including the Horizon 2020 programme.

The Biodiversity Heritage is a charter signatory of the Bouchout Declaration  for Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management. The Declaration is a call to action for institutions to support biodiversity knowledge management.

On 11 April 2014, BHL Program Director Martin Kalfatovic gave a keynote address at the EOD Conference 2014. The conference, “EOD Conference 2014: Sustaining the networked future: use and reuse of digital content”, was held at the University of Innsbruck. The talk was attended by about 150 librarians from around the European Union. EOD (eBooks on Demand) is a EU funded project to provide for digitization on demand for consortia members and this conference marked the close of the multi-year project. The talk, entitled “Building for Demand: The Growth of the Biodiversity Heritage Library as Global Digital Library” can be found online here (and embedded below).

For the 2014 BHL Technical Meeting, the BHL Technical Advisory Group (TAG) met at the Missouri Botanical Garden (MBG) (2-3 April 2014) with William Ulate (Technical Director) and Martin Kalfatovic (BHL Program Director). Also joining the meeting were the BHL tech team based at MBG (Trish Rose-Sandler and Mike Lichtenberg), Carolyn Sheffield (BHL Program Manager), Bianca Crowley (BHL Collections Coordinator, by phone), and Connie Rinaldo (BHL Executive Committee Vice-Chair, by phone). The group met to review BHL technical development priorities, staffing and communications concerns, and related topics.  Over the course of the two-day meeting, the group discussed priorities in terms of both core BHL technical operations as well as special projects that BHL participates in.

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.