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BHL has a new look and improved functionality. As a result of user feedback received from the BHL survey and through our feedback form we have improved the BHL interface. Gone are the days of the subject keyword tag-cloud on the BHL homepage. Today, the new interface provides a variety of tabs to facilitate simple or advanced search strategies.

September 22 to 24, in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, took place the Global BHL Technical Meeting, it was the very first time all signed and prospective BHL partners were going to be together at such meeting. There were representatives from all over the world, including Australia, Brazil, Egypt, Europe and the US; unfortunately our colleagues from China were unable to make it. We had a very productive meeting to know each other and present each other’s work in order to describe priorities and requirements for a Global BHL.

It is no secret that the Biodiversity Heritage Library project has grown on a global scale, with BHL projects springing up in Europe, China, Australia, Brazil, and Egypt. Many of our new partners rely of the experience of BHL-US, as the original BHL project has come to be known, for insight and suggestions. One such partner is BHL-Europe, and a recent BHL-EU meeting in London proved to be a valuable opportunity to not only allow our European partners to gather and discuss various technical and workflow issues, but also to allow representatives from BHL-US to provide input based on our experience.

BHL “Classic” as we often refer to ourselves, is pleased to introduce our latest global partner, BHL SciELO, from Brazil. Launched December 1st, 2010 in a public event at the Museum of Zoology of the University of Sao Paulo, BHL Brazil is implemented by the Scientific Electronic Library (SciELO) Program. Sharing BHL’s open access practices, they maintain an online multidisciplinary collection of quality journals which will total more than 700 titles by the end of this year.

Chris Freeland, Martin Kalfatovic and Keri Thompson attended technical meetings related to the Biodiversity Heritage Library China node, November 15-17, 2010. The meetings, held at the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing) took place over three days and covered scanning workflow, operation of the Internet Archive Scribe machine, technical standards for ingesting BHL-China materials into the BHL portal site, and replicating BHL data on IB/CAS servers.

A promo video for the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Staff of BHL are humbled to announce that we have been recognized by the Society for the History of Natural History for the past three years of efforts on behalf of our digital repository. The John Thackray Medal is especially rewarding to receive because it appreciates the comprehensive nature of our work. BHL is here to support the work of plant, animal and earth scientists alike and the John Thackray Medal is likewise an advocate for the broadest sense of natural history. We sincerely thank the Society for their work as well.