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The staff of the BHL are saddened to announce the recent death of Cathy Norton. Cathy, former Library Director of the MBLWHOI Library, was a founding member and a guiding force during the early years of the BHL. Cathy served as the first Vice-Chair of the BHL Executive Committee and later as Chair. Nancy E. Gwinn, current Chair of the BHL Executive Committee said “Cathy was an indefatigable spirit whose enthusiasm buoyed the whole BHL group, members and staff, from the beginning. She will be sorely missed.” Constance Rinaldo, BHL Vice-Chair added “Cathy was an inspiration professionally and personally.

We are pleased to announce the release of two new BHL online exhibitions: Early Women in Science and Latino Natural History. Earlier this year, the Smithsonian Women’s Committee awarded a one-year grant to Smithsonian Libraries (SIL) to build online exhibitions to showcase the scientific and historical contributions of Women and Latino naturalists and illustrators.

Sharks, Passenger Pigeons, Scientific Illustrations, Crowdsourcing, National Agricultural Library, GBIF, and Semantic Metadata. What do all these things have in common? They’re all BHL news stories from the past few months! Get the latest BHL project news in our latest quarterly report and newsletter! Don’t get our newsletter?

The importance and need for unique, persistent identifiers for reliable access to published literature has become widely accepted, and the literature for the biodiversity informatics community is no exception.  For published works, these generally take the form of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). BHL has been consistently assigning CrossRef DOIs to monographic publications for three years. However, the number of items in BHL with DOIs remains relatively small with just over 68,000 assigned to date.  In addition to the remaining monographs, BHL now also has over 140,000 articles identified, primarily via BioStor.