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BHL is honored to learn that we’ve been nominated for a Zedler Award by Wikimedia Deutschland.  This award acknowledges contributions of individuals, groups or projects who have made contributions to free and open knowledge.

On 11 April 2014, BHL Program Director Martin Kalfatovic gave a keynote address at the EOD Conference 2014. The conference, “EOD Conference 2014: Sustaining the networked future: use and reuse of digital content”, was held at the University of Innsbruck. The talk was attended by about 150 librarians from around the European Union. EOD (eBooks on Demand) is a EU funded project to provide for digitization on demand for consortia members and this conference marked the close of the multi-year project. The talk, entitled “Building for Demand: The Growth of the Biodiversity Heritage Library as Global Digital Library” can be found online here (and embedded below).

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries, welcomes Washington University Libraries (St. Louis, Missouri) as a new member. The 14th member of the BHL consortium, Washington University Libraries will help identify and digitize historical science literature from its collections and add these to the BHL’s online holdings, where all materials may be accessed free by the public. Founded in 1853, Washington University in St. Louis is a medium-sized independent research institution widely recognized for its teaching, research, patient care and service to society.

For the 2014 BHL Technical Meeting, the BHL Technical Advisory Group (TAG) met at the Missouri Botanical Garden (MBG) (2-3 April 2014) with William Ulate (Technical Director) and Martin Kalfatovic (BHL Program Director). Also joining the meeting were the BHL tech team based at MBG (Trish Rose-Sandler and Mike Lichtenberg), Carolyn Sheffield (BHL Program Manager), Bianca Crowley (BHL Collections Coordinator, by phone), and Connie Rinaldo (BHL Executive Committee Vice-Chair, by phone). The group met to review BHL technical development priorities, staffing and communications concerns, and related topics.  Over the course of the two-day meeting, the group discussed priorities in terms of both core BHL technical operations as well as special projects that BHL participates in.

In early February, the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) hosted the EOL-BHL Research Sprint. NESCent, based in Durham, NC, is a non-profit science center supporting research in the evolutionary sciences. NESCent emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach to research, and so the idea behind the Sprint was to put together teams of programmers and life scientists to expose each other to questions and ways of thinking that they might not necessarily consider in their normal work.

BHL member and affiliates met in New York City for the 2014 Annual Meeting (10-11 March 2014). The annual meeting is a chance for the leaders of BHL members and affiliates to learn what is happening around BHL and to give updates from their own institutions. This year, the meeting was held jointly by the New York Botanical Garden and the American Museum of Natural History. The first day of meetings was hosted by Susan Fraser, Director of the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden.