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The TDWG 2013 Annual Conference has kicked off in Florence, Italy and will run through November 1, 2013.

BHL recently participated in the 8th Meeting of European Bird Curators, held in Prague, October 3-5, 2013. Alison Harding, of the Natural History Museum in London, delivered a presentation entitled “BHL: The Vast Library of Life.”  The presentation provided an overview of the Biodiversity Heritage Library and showcased the tools and resources which BHL offers as a free, open access project. Many attendees were already familiar with BHL and were very complimentary about the ongoing progress of the BHL consortium.

We’re very excited to share that yesterday, October 9, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) launched their new web portal as part of the 20th meeting of the GBIF Governing Board.  The new portal provides greatly enhanced access to the world’s largest database of documented evidence for the distribution of species across the planet. The scientific meeting was held in Berlin and webcast for the press and public. Tim Hirsch, Senior Program Officer for Engagement, and Tim Robertson, Information Systems Architect, introduced and demonstrated some of the new features now available.

We invite participants for an event that will pioneer the mining of the Encyclopedia of Life (http://eol.org) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org) to address outstanding and novel questions about the ecology and evolution of biodiversity. We aim to identify questions and data for which biologists may lack informatics skills and resources to address or analyze successfully; and symmetrically, to guide informaticians to pressing ecological and evolutionary questions.

A blinking cursor on a blank screen. 137 million objects, 8.2 million digitized items, illustrations and photographs, artifacts and first editions, spanning 19 institutions, 9 research centers, and hundreds of years. Where to begin? It didn’t begin earlier this summer when I started working as the marketing intern at the BHL, and it didn’t begin earlier this year when I originally applied for the position. It probably didn’t even begin when I enrolled in the University of Washington’s master of library and information science iSchool. For the sake of argument, I’d say the beginning for me was when I was 6 years old and took my first trip to Washington, D.C.

BHL is pleased to announce that its Summer Newsletter is now available!  As you’re enjoying the final days of summer, check out our latest newsletter to catch up on all that we’ve accomplished in the past few months.  For example, find out how our partnership with EOL has recently become a little closer, learn what our first iBook is about,   and see our latest digitization statistics.