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The 2024 Biodiversity Heritage Library Annual Meeting saw BHL partners and interested parties returning to Chicago, Illinois, the location of many BHL gatherings over the years. This year’s meeting was also significant as it coincided with the dual emergence of Brood XIII of Periodical Cicadas (Magicicada) and Brood XIX elsewhere in Illinois and the Midwest.

Attendees were welcomed to Chicago by our co-hosts, The Field Museum of Natural History and the Chicago Botanic Garden. Throughout the week of 13 May to 17 May, attendees were treated to behind-the-scenes tours at both locations. The BHL Day 2024 Symposium, Year of the Cicada: Buzzing with 17 Years of Biodiversity Achievements, took advantage of the emergence of the Magicicada Brood XIII emergence and featured Magicicada expert, Dr. Gene Kritsky, as keynote speaker.

Dr. Nancy E. Gwinn, past Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) Executive Committee Chair (2011-2017) and Director Emerita, Smithsonian Institution Libraries, died in the Washington, DC area on April 29, 2024.

An important advocate for BHL as Director of Smithsonian Libraries, Nancy was an early supporter of what would become BHL through an active engagement with the Smithsonian’s biodiversity and science research.

William Ulate Rodríguez, past Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) Technical Director, died in St. Louis on September 20, 2023. William was a father, a friend, a colleague, and a passionate advocate of using the tools of bioinformatics to better understand life on our planet.

William’s friends and colleagues share their fond memories of his life and work.

2023 proved to be a transformative year of growth, increased collaboration, and heightened dedication to advancing biodiversity knowledge for the BHL Cataloging and Metadata Committee. Last year, the Committee achieved significant milestones in committee governance, professional development opportunities, data quality updates, and the ratification of consortia-wide data policies, accompanied by comprehensive documentation.

In 2023, BHL’s Technical Team dedicated significant efforts to improve our data ecosystem, now comprising 61+ million pages of biodiversity literature. Last year’s Technical Priorities underscored BHL’s steadfast commitment to data quality by focusing on both upstream and downstream data flows. Notable milestones include delivering refined taxonomic data to researchers, implementing interface improvements based on user feedback, and forging data pipelines for existing and new downstream data consumers. 

Our latest bi-annual newsletter is now available! From flora and fauna in New Zealand to new Affiliates in Belgium and the United States, don’t miss the latest news from the BHL community.

View our November 2023 Bi-annual Newsletter.

In the face of climate change and environmental challenges, understanding and documenting Earth’s biodiversity is essential. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) serves as a global repository for biodiversity data, playing a pivotal role in this critical mission of safeguarding our planet’s biodiversity. Species occurrence data sourced from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) provides insights into species distributions, behaviors, and interactions much deeper into time, offering key species baseline data required to effectively address the climate crisis. Without accurate and comprehensive data in GBIF, our collective ability to track environmental changes and make informed decisions is severely hampered.

As a GBIF participant node, BHL is committed to sharing biodiversity data openly, adhering to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics) data principles, and collaborating with a global network of biodiversity organizations to bolster and build capacity to strengthen the biodiversity information infrastructure. To honor our commitments, technical staff from BHL are working to establish a scalable data pipeline of occurrence data currently trapped in archival field notes, journals, letters, correspondence, and other primary source materials. The journey has been an arduous one due to poor OCR (optical character recognition) data quality for BHL’s sub-corpus of handwritten materials.