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BHL developers have released several significant updates to the BHL portal today. These updates include:For a complete list of bugs and enhancements included in this release, visit our issue tracking web site.

Today, February 12, 2008, we celebrate the 199th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. Last year we honored the 300th anniversary of the birth of Carl Linné and next year will be the double celebrations for Darwin’s bicentenary and the sesquicentennial (mark your calenders now for November 24th!) of the publication of On the Origin of Species. 2008 is thus a good year for those of us involved with the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) to pause for a moment between these landmark anniversary years of 2007 and 2009.

The Feb. 2, 2008 issue of Science News includes an article by Susan Milius (“Biological Moon Shot”) on the Encyclopedia of Life and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. BHL member staff Tom Garnett and Martin Kalfatovic are quote in the article.

Smithsonian Institution Libraries staff members Martin Kalfatovic and Suzanne Pilsk gave a presentation on BHL to staff from the National Agriculture Library, the USDA Agriculture Research Service, the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and others.

The NC State Insect Museum blog gave the Biodiversity Heritage Library

The Missouri Botanical Garden (MOBOT), located in St. Louis, MO, is seeking to hire a Senior Programmer Analyst to work on several large biodiversity informatics projects, including the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) online at www.biodiversitylibrary.org.

The BHL (http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/About.aspx) currently consists of English language collections from the USA and UK (although we have huge amounts of material in over 40 other languages). I am working with European colleagues to develop a programme of activity in Europe to cover the other European languages. German and Netherlands colleagues are already working on bids and trial scanning. We are preparing a bid to the EU eContentplus programme for money to manage these activities across Europe (unfortunately, the EU will not fund scanning directly) and this will be lead by the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin.