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Join us for Seeds in the Stacks, a Facebook Live tour at the USDA National Agricultural Library! We’ll go behind-the-scenes to explore selections from the Library’s collection of over 200,000 seed and nursery catalogs.

HTTPS? What does it mean? HTTP is the language that your browser uses to communicate to BHL and the S stands for Secure, encrypted, unreadable, or at least much, much harder to read.The web is moving to encrypted connections across the board. In 2014 Google announced that their page rank algorithm that decides the order of your google.com search results will now rank insecure pages slightly lower than secure pages. From security to rankings, encrypted connections are better for everyone.

This quarter, the Biodiversity Heritage Library welcomed the Oak Spring Garden Foundation (OSGF) as a new Affiliate. The BHL consortium now consists of 19 Members and 18 Affiliates.

Last week the Association of Zoos and Aquariums held its annual conference in Indianapolis, Indiana. The conference draws around 2,800 attendees from a diverse group of institutions and organizations around the world. The Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature team was able to send representation and take part in the poster presentations.

Hello again from the NDSR Residents! Since our last update in July we’ve been focusing on transforming our research into recommendation outlines that we presented to the BHL Tech Team last week. As we head into the final quarter of our residencies, we’ll be focusing on tweaking these ideas, developing workflows and proof of concepts, and finalizing our recommendations in a Best Practices White Paper by December. For this update, we wanted to give a preview of what some of these recommendations will look like and invite some preliminary feedback from the BHL Blog-o-sphere that we can consider as we move into these final months.

Along with BHL Program Manager Carolyn Sheffield, I represented BHL as a delegate to the XIX International Botanical Congress in Shenzhen, China. Held during the week of 24-28 July 2017, the Congress (which is held every five years) drew over 6,000 botanists from around the world. The Congress provided an excellent opportunity to catch up with colleagues from around the world and learn about some of the latest botanical research.