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Our latest quarterly newsletter is now available! From our BHL symposium at the virtual TDWG 2020 conference to the most recent additions to our Earth Optimism series, don’t miss the latest news from the BHL community.

View our November 2020 Quarterly Newsletter.

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This year, as organizations around the world have done in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) held its annual conference virtually. With a mix of online working sessions, webinar-style symposia, presentations, panel discussions, and recorded presentations, this year’s conference was held across two separate periods—the first dedicated to working sessions during the week of 21-25 September 2020 and the second to symposia and panel sessions the week of 19-23 October 2020.

On 20 October 2020 as part of the TDWG 2020 virtual conference, BHL hosted a symposium, “SYM03 Enhancing Connections With the Global Neighbourhood Through Expanding Partnerships”, organized by Constance Rinaldo (Librarian of the Ernst Mayr Library, Harvard and Chair of the BHL Executive Committee) and Colleen Funkhouser (BHL Program Manager, Smithsonian Libraries).

The symposium consisted of four talks, covering topics including building BHL’s technical strategy, digital object identifiers (DOIs), taxonomic name finding services, and BHL’s response to the global COVID-19 pandemic.

We are honored to celebrate the career of Susan Fraser, who last month retired as the Thomas J. Hubbard Vice President and Director of the LuEsther T. Mertz Library at The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG). During her 36 years at NYBG, Susan made significant contributions to the Garden, the global library and botanical community, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL).

In our latest newsletter, we share some of the ways we have been working to improve the Library over the past few months, such as deploying a new taxonomic name finding tool and making our records available in WorldCat. Additionally, with many of our partners now operating in a telework environment, we have focused on projects to improve our digital collections remotely, such as uploading born digital content, improving collection metadata, and building our image collections on Flickr.

Check out our latest quarterly newsletter to learn more.

BHL has deployed a new taxonomic name finding tool to improve the speed and accuracy of identifying names throughout its 58+ million pages.

BHL is now usingGlobal Names Architecture’s (GNA) gnfinder tool to locate taxonomic names in the BHL corpus. Prior to this deployment, BHL’s name finding services were based on an index of scientific names created by GNA developers six years ago by parsing every page in BHL one by one. This took 45 days to accomplish, and the cost of repeating this process made updating or improving the index infeasible.

The gnfinder tool uses fast, scalable programming languages to significantly reduce computational time. Using Open Source applications in Go and Scala, the tool detects candidate scientific names and compares them to millions of scientific name-strings aggregated by GNA for verification. The new process decreases the time needed for name detection and name verification from 35 days to 5 hours and from 7 days to 12 hours, respectively. As a result, the entire BHL corpus can now be indexed in less than a day, compared to the 45 days needed for the previous index. Additionally, by significantly reducing computational time, implementing iterative improvements to the index is now achievable.

Ten years ago in June 2010, the Atlas of Living Australia and Museums Victoria signed an agreement with the Biodiversity Heritage Library – and BHL Australia was born.

BHL Australia’s mission is to make Australia’s biodiversity literature freely accessible and discoverable. Ten years ago, we started with a single contributing organisation, Museums Victoria, and a team of five incredibly dedicated volunteers. 

Over the past 10 years, BHL Australia has grown considerably. Our operation is still hosted by Museums Victoria (at the Melbourne Museum), but we now digitise literature (and ingest born-digital material) on behalf of 27 organisations across the country. 

We are now a truly national project, representing Australia’s state and territory museums, herbaria, royal societies and field naturalists clubs, as well as government agencies and natural history publishers. Together these organisations have contributed more than 350,000 pages from over 2,400 volumes.

Like many organizations around the world, the Biodiversity Heritage Library was compelled to move the 2020 BHL Annual Meeting to a virtual environment. In consultation with our prospective 2020 hosts, the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris, the BHL Executive Committee made the difficult, yet necessary, decision on 11 March 2020 to move to a virtual meeting rescheduled from April to May.

The 2020 BHL Virtual Annual Meeting was conducted over the course of May 2020. The Executive Committee and Secretariat staff provided pre-recorded video presentations which were made available to the BHL partner community in early May. Three video calls were hosted at various time zones in mid- to late-May to allow for the widest participation and the least inconvenience for partners. These three calls brought together 38 participants from 24 institutions and organizations, representing eight countries, and provided an opportunity for interaction and discussion even while separated by (in some cases great) distances.