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The Biodiversity Heritage Library is pleased to welcome the University of Toronto Libraries (UTL) as a new Member. UTL is the first Canadian library to join the Biodiversity Heritage Library as a Member.

You too can be like a librarian … a Biodiversity Heritage Library librarian! The Biodiversity Heritage Library wants people to use its resources, and Wikipedia is encouraging librarian-minded folk to add citations to articles via their #1Lib1Ref campaign (15 January – 3 February 2017). Talk about a perfect match. You can help by adding citations from BHL to Wikipedia. Don’t worry if you haven’t edited Wikipedia before. What follows is an easy “How to” guide to adding a citation from works held in BHL to a Wikipedia article. Your first step is to create a Wikipedia account.

The 2016 TDWG Biodiversity Information Standards meeting was held at the Centro de Transferencia Tecnológica y Educación Continua (CTEC) in San Carlos, Costa Rica. Hotels and other activities were in La Fortuna, about a 45 minute bus ride from CTEC. BHL was represented at the TDWG 2016 conference with a symposium, “BHL: 10 Years of Innovation and Growth”. The panel consisted of:

The session was attended by about 70 people. The conclusion of the session was a discussion with the audience about desires for the future direction of BHL and features or services that could be implemented as BHL explores refactoring the BHL platform.

At the end of October I attended the Internet Archive Library Leaders Forum 2016. This was the 3rd time I’ve attended this meeting since 2009 and was by far the best one yet! The Forum coincided with IA’s 20th anniversary so there was a big push from IA to showcase their latest and greatest to celebrate their platinum year.     The most successful aspect of the Forum was meeting with Internet Archive colleagues and partners face to face, many of which share similar digitization workflow and collection management challenges to BHL.

Just past the halfway point of its 2-year IMLS grant period, the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL) project has made significant contributions to BHL’s collections and is well on its way to achieving its stated goals: securing permission for 50 in-copyright titles; adding 100 new contributors; adding 300,000 metadata records; and positioning BHL as an on-ramp for content delivered to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).   EABL was conceived to address some of the persistent challenges facing digital repositories in the U.S. scientific community.

I was honored to participate in the signing ceremony on 2 December 2016 where Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle officially joined the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Accompanying Dr. Nancy E. Gwinn (Smithsonian Libraries Director and Chair of the BHL Members’ Council), the ceremony was held in the amphitheater of the Galeries d’Anatomie comparée et de Paléontologie. Attending on behalf of the MNHN were Dr.