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As the Coordinator of BHL Australia, I’m based at Museum Victoria in Melbourne. This is a very long way from BHL headquarters in Washington DC – in both space and time. The time difference between Melbourne and DC is 14 hours and, while I’ve had countless conversations with BHL staff via email, our opposing work hours make phone calls or virtual meetings almost impossible. Last month I was able to visit my BHL colleagues in person. I had been invited to speak at the Society of American Archivists conference about my work digitizing and transcribing the handwritten field diaries of Australia’s early naturalists.

In 2014, BHL welcomed the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a member. The University’s Library is a campus-wide network of libraries serving programs of learning and research in many disciplines and is the largest public university research library in the country with more than 13 million volumes. The Biology Library collection alone contains over 137,000 volumes. To date, the University Library has contributed over 1.2 million pages from over 4,400 volumes to BHL. Illustrations from many of these books have also been made available in the BHL Flickr.

As game players are growing beanstalks and leading the Eugene Mellonballers to victory, historic books are being saved from digital oblivion.

In November 2014, Museum Victoria started a project to digitize and transcribe the field diaries in our collection. These diaries, handwritten by Australia’s early field naturalists long before the days of electronic notetaking, are rich in scientific data and historic detail. They provide insights into past species distribution and abundance, as well as the trials and wonders experienced on historic expeditions. They are fascinating sources of information and yet very few people have ever read them.

The Smithsonian Libraries received a $511,200 grant from the Arcadia Fund for The Field Book Project to provide free, online access to the Smithsonian’s field books on biodiversity research.

As the daughter of a children’s librarian and library branch manager, I grew up in public libraries and have become passionate about the important role a library plays within a community. This has led me down the path of becoming a librarian myself. Originally from California, I’m now living on the east coast and attending graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill pursuing my passion for this institution. This coming year is my last year of school for a dual Master degree program in Library Science and Public Administration.