All posts in Tech Updates

For the 2014 BHL Technical Meeting, the BHL Technical Advisory Group (TAG) met at the Missouri Botanical Garden (MBG) (2-3 April 2014) with William Ulate (Technical Director) and Martin Kalfatovic (BHL Program Director). Also joining the meeting were the BHL tech team based at MBG (Trish Rose-Sandler and Mike Lichtenberg), Carolyn Sheffield (BHL Program Manager), Bianca Crowley (BHL Collections Coordinator, by phone), and Connie Rinaldo (BHL Executive Committee Vice-Chair, by phone). The group met to review BHL technical development priorities, staffing and communications concerns, and related topics.  Over the course of the two-day meeting, the group discussed priorities in terms of both core BHL technical operations as well as special projects that BHL participates in.

William Ulate, BHL Technical Director and I are pleased to announce the creation of the BHL Technical Advisory Group (BHL TAG). The BHL TAG will work with William and the Technical Development team at the Missouri Botanical Garden (Mike Lichtenberg and Trish Rose-Sandler) in an advisory capacity.

On September 27-28, 2012, thirty-one staff members representing all 14 BHL member institutions convened at the Ernst Mayr Library at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University for the 2012 BHL Staff and Technical Meeting. As a combined meeting, it brought together not only those that manage the digitization workflow at each member institution, but also those that work to keep BHL’s technical infrastructure running smoothly and constantly improving.

“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.

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.