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In October 2019, more than 700 people from over 75 countries gathered in Leiden, the Netherlands for Biodiversity_Next, a joint conference by GBIF, DISSCo, iDigBio, CETAF, TDWG, and LifeWatch Eric. Hosted by the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, a BHL Affiliate, in collaboration with the Netherlands Biodiversity Information Facility, the main conference ran from 22-25 October 2019, with pre-conference workshops occurring 20-21 October, as well as organization-specific meetings for GBIF, CETAF, and TDWG being held in conjunction with the conference. Eighteen BHL-affiliated representatives from our partner community, representing 13 institutions from nine countries, attended the conference, and 11 BHL-affiliated staff presented or moderated 16 talks or sessions. Dr. Elycia Wallis (Atlas of Living Australia; BHL Member representative for BHL Australia) served as a key member of the Programme Committee. Members of the BHL Executive Committee (EC) and colleagues from the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle represented BHL at the various organizational meetings, including GBIF, TDWG, and CETAF.

Do you want to help empower global biodiversity research and serve as part of a vibrant, international community dedicated to providing free, worldwide access to biodiversity information? The Biodiversity Heritage Library seeks a Program Manager committed to elevating current successes and challenging our Program into the future by ensuring organizational excellence, fostering strategic partnerships, and embracing advances in digital technologies, information science, big data, and bioinformatics to serve the evolving needs of 21st century researchers.

Since July 2016, the papers of taxonomic botanist John Torrey (1796-1873) have been the focus of a digitization and crowdsourced transcription project at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG). Digitizing and Transcribing the John Torrey Papers, organized in coordination with the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, was created in an effort to digitize and make virtually accessible the correspondence of John Torrey and his colleagues, specifically letters received by Dr. Torrey.

At the Long Night of the Museums on 31 August 2019, the library of the Museum für Naturkunde presented its digitisation activities around a current project to index its Drory Library. In addition to particularly impressive books from the collection, which are already accessible in the Biodiversity Heritage Library, two books were digitised which were not yet available in BHL.

The BHL website was recently updated for new fields to download content. The TSV Data Exports are being updated to mirror this change. Please review these changes if you rely on the field order instead of the field names of the TSV file.

Two new fossil fly species have been named in honor of the Smithsonian Libraries and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Sylvicola silibrarius Greenwalt, 2019 and Kishenehnoasilus bhl Dikow, 2019 have been described from specimens collected from the 46-million-year-old Kishenehn Formation of northwestern Montana. The species were published last week in the open access journal Palaeontologia Electronica.

Enjoying your summer? We are, because we’ve been busy these past few months and have a lot to share! From crowdsourced transcriptions in BHL to new article download functionality and a new paleobiology collection curated by Smithsonian Libraries, check out all of the latest program news in the 2019 Summer Newsletter.

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