All posts by Martin R. Kalfatovic

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.”

We had a very good 3rd ICADLA meeting in Ifrane, Morocco. As part of the Advisory Committee, I was very pleased with the over all program (though disappointed that there was so much confusion in having a representative from the Google Cultural Institute and then the person ended up not attending).The opening keynote, by Misako Ito (UNESCO Office for Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania and Tunisia) provided a good kick off to the meeting.

BHL image files are hosted by the Internet Archive (IA). The IA will be upgrading their power 16-17 April 2013. This will result in planned outages to the system. These outages will affect BHL’s ability to serve page images, generate PDFs, and downloads of certain file types.Searching and browsing BHL metadata will not be affected by this outage.Please be aware that in addition to the planned outages listed below, there may be residual and temporary outages around planned downtime.Scheduled downtimes:In the event of any additional major outages, please monitor this site for more information.Sorry for the inconvenience that this will cause our BHL users, but in the end this will provide better service.