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.

Funding for the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) comes from a number of sources. Over the past few years, we have been reliant on the generous support of a number of different foundations, directly or through grants to individual BHL members. These foundations include the MacArthur Foundation, the Moore Foundation, the Lounsberry Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Keck Foundation. A number of the BHL members have also received grants from the United States government, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the National Science Foundation.

Four years ago today, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, along with the Encyclopedia of Life, was officially launched during an event at the National Academy of Sciences.At the time of the launch, there were just over a million pages of taxonomic literature available on the site. Today, there are now just short of 34 million pages.

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.