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We just had the Second Global BHL Planning Meeting in Chicago Field Museum this past November 13, 2011 with representatives of all BHL Programs, except our colleagues from Bibliotheca Alexandrina, who couldn’t attend this time. During the meeting, each of our BHL Programs shared their progress since our (last Global Meeting on September 2010) and it was definitely a year of new and valuable achievements for all.

Several months ago, we introduced a new BHL logo, and to publicize the event, we published a blog post that detailed the various images that BHL Staff Members saw within the abstract lines of our new logo. At the end of the post, we asked our users to share their interpretations of the logo with us as well. Many of you did, and, as promised, we’re sharing those today. We send a special thanks to all of you who shared your thoughts with us, and if our logo inspires other ideas, don’t hesitate to share them by commenting on this blog, sending us a tweet (@BioDivLibrary), or posting on our Facebook wall.

“How long is a piece of string?” isn’t a familiar idiom to those living in the Midwest of the continental United States. Well, it wasn’t to at least one person living in the Midwest. It’s the answer you’ll get in the BHL AU office to questions like “How long does it take to build a website?” or any other question to which there isn’t a definitive answer for the general case, like “How big is a page image in BHL?”

We first launched our article download functionality back in January of 2009, giving users the ability to create their own PDF of selected pages from an item in BHL. Since that time, over 79,000 articles have been created by our users. That’s an average of 80 articles created each day (thanks WolframAlpha.com)! Clearly the ability to create your own PDF of selected pages, rather than download the entire book or volume, is a useful service; something we have been working on to make improvements whenever possible.

Funding for the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) comes from a number of sources. Over the past few years, we have been reliant on the generous support of a number of different foundations, directly or through grants to individual BHL members. These foundations include the MacArthur Foundation, the Moore Foundation, the Lounsberry Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Keck Foundation. A number of the BHL members have also received grants from the United States government, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the National Science Foundation.

If you’re active in social media, chances are you’ve already discovered our presence on a variety of platforms, including Facebook, Flickr, Pinterest and Twitter (for a list of all of our social media accounts, visit our public wiki). You can now also see linked icons to each of our social media platforms on the lower left-hand side of BHL’s home page.

If you’ve visited our site in the past few days, or follow our blog, you know that BHL now has a new and improved logo! We have our friends at BHL-Australia to thank for this exciting new development, as our logo is a modified version of their own eye-catching design. Before the BHL-Au logo designer, Simon O’Shea, left the BHL-Au project for a new assignment with Lonely Planet, he contributed his creative talent to adapt his original design for our use. He also provided style guidelines that can help extend the use of the logo globally.