All posts by Carolyn Sheffield

BHL was pleased to have the results of their participation in the 2018 LIS Education and Data Science for the National Digital Platform (LEADS-4-NDP) shared via a poster at the 2019 iConference held at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) from 31 March – 3 April, 2019. The LEADS program, funded by the Institution of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and led by Drexel’s Metadata Research Center, supported ten Fellows in 2018 to develop data science skills by contributing to fast-paced, 10-week projects at several different host sites throughout the US. This conference provided an opportunity to present BHL’s LEADS project alongside those from two other 2018 LEADS Fellows as well some Fellows who were recently selected for the 2019 program.

As part of BHL’s mission to ‘improve research methodology by making biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community’, the BHL Secretariat and Partners regularly participate in meetings and initiatives centered on collaborating with other biodiversity organizations throughout the world. One such recent event was the 2nd Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference (GBIC2) held in Copenhagen from 24-27 July 2018.

Organized by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the meeting convened stakeholders from across the biodiversity informatics community to explore a model for coordinating across geographic and political boundaries to share and link data managed by various biodiversity infrastructures. GBIC2 was organized to build on outcomes and recommendations from the first GBIC meeting held in 2012. The Global Biodiversity Informatics Outlook (GBIO) framework (pictured below), developed as part of that first GBIC meeting, served as a foundation for exploring various considerations–from the cultural to the technological–involved in managing and sharing resources related to biodiversity data, evidence, and understanding.

On February 1 – 3, the 2017 National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR) BHL cohort convened in Washington, DC for an intensive two-day BHL Workshop followed by tours of local library and museum collections. As part of the Institute for Museum and Library Serves (IMLS)-funded Foundations to Actions grant, five residents will each be working with BHL mentors over the next 12 months to identify ways to improve our workflows and website and to enhance the user experience.

The 31 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) (http://www.spnhc2016.berlin/) was jointly hosted by the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and the Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum in Berlin, 20-25 June 2016. The SPNHC conference brings together representatives from natural history museums, universities, and biodiversity data aggregators and serves as a wonderful opportunity for BHL to connect with formal partner institutions, collaborators such as GBIF, as well as many BHL users.

Solenne Coutagne of the Bibliotheque Interuniversitaire de Santé (BIU Santé) in Paris visited the Smithsonian Libraries during a tour of library and museum collections in the DC area. Solenne is the manager of digital projects at BIU Santé, the largest medical library in France. On 19 April, she met with Martin Kalfatovic and Carolyn Sheffield to discuss digitization initiatives and learn about BHL’s workflows.  While on site, Jacqueline Chapman and Daniel Euphrat provided a tour of the Libraries’ scanning facility and overview of BHL’s scanning operations at the National Museum of Natural History. As part of her Smithsonian tour, Solenne also met with Leslie Overstreet in the Joseph F.

BHL is thrilled to welcome CONABIO as its newest Member and Global Node! Comisión Nacional para el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad (National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity, or CONABIO) joined on December 16, 2014 and will also serve as the BHL’s newest global node, BHL Mexico. CONABIO brings a strong conservation perspective and is positioned to help expand BHL’s reach to Spanish-speaking communities. To kickoff their membership, CONABIO hosted representatives from BHL Central, December 15 – 17, at their offices in Mexico City.