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I was the Virtual Marketing Intern at Smithsonian’s Biodiversity Heritage Library in fall 2013. I participated in this internship post graduation because while I have previous experience with social media and marketing from my previous career, this internship provided me experience directly promoting a library collection. Also, while my background and passion is in the arts, I always had and will have a special place in my heart for science, especially biology. For the position, I wrote seven blog posts that highlighted books from the BHL library.

Dr. Geoffrey Mwachala, Director, Research and Collection at the National Museum of Kenya, stopped to visit Martin Kalfatovic and Nancy Gwinn while in Washington on other biodiversity and museum collections business at the Smithsonian. While at Smithsonian Libraries, he was able to visit the scanning facility in the National Museum of Natural History and see some of the BHL digitization operations in action. Dr. Mwachala is a strong supporter of BHL Africa and the expansion of biodiversity knowledge.

The NEH-funded Art of Life project recently held its second face to face meeting November 2013 in St. Louis, Missouri.  Institutions represented were from the Missouri Botanical Garden (MOBOT), Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), the University of Colorado Boulder (CU-Boulder); Washington University, St Louis (WUSTL), and Smithsonian Institution Libraries (SIL). The team focused primarily on how to bring the algorithm work to a close.  The IMA developed four algorithms for identifying which pages in the BHL corpus contain images.  Those algorithms were run across a gold standard set of 40k pages to determine their accuracy and performance.  Two of the four algorithms were deemed to be useful (accuracy ratings were above 80%).

I was privileged to attend and present at the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) meeting. The theme for 2013 was “Virtual Communities for Biodiversity Science”, an apt theme for the global virtual Biodiversity Heritage Library. The venue was beautiful Florence, Italy and the weather was warm.

If you’re reading this blog, you probably already know that BHL provides free and open access to millions of pages of biodiversity literature.

I also had the luck to attend the TDWG Annual Conference in Florence, Italy this past October/November 2013. This year’s topic was “Virtual Communities for Biodiversity Science”, a very relevant topic for BHL and one notable difference of this year’s meeting, compared to the last three years I have attended, was the numerous Symposia and Workshops organized by several communities within biodiversity informatics.

BHL is a collaborative endeavor, no doubt about it; and it’s been thanks to these collaborations that we have the technical achievements we have. For many reasons, this is a good time to be thankful. So as the BHL Technical Director, I would like to start by thanking my colleagues.