On May 20th, Graham Higley, head of library and information services at the Natural History Museum in London, accepted the 2010 John Thackray medal, which was awarded to the BHL in recognition of our past three years of work building our digital library. Mr. Higley (pictured left) accepted this award on behalf of Tom Garnett, Director of the BHL.

The John Thackray medal “recognizes significant achievements in the history or bibliography of natural history.” According to the website for The Society for the History of Natural History, which awards this medal, “significant achievements” specifically include “making available … collections and/or information in new and novel ways.” While the 34 million + pages of literature that BHL has now made available for open access use, in addition to several of our special features, such as species name finding, the ability to generate your own custom PDF, and the opportunity to nominate titles for scanning, is a great start, this award serves as an encouragement to all of us at BHL to continue pushing the envelope and developing new ways to provide meaningful information and services to our users.

When asked to comment about the significance of this award for BHL, Mr. Higley responded,

“John Thackray was a past President of The Society for the History of Natural History (SHNH) and also the Archivist at the Natural History Museum, London (NHM) for several decades. It is particularly fitting that the BHL should be recognized by this award, since John and his colleagues in the SHNH made avid use of the historic collections at the NHM. It is now possible for their successors to look at or obtain copies of these rare early texts directly from the BHL, which is a truly global resource for historians as well as current scientists.”

We send a special thanks to The Society for the History of Natural History for honoring us with this award. We plan to continue to provide rare, important, and relevant biodiversity information to our users, and promise to continue developing novel ways for our users to interact with and use this content.

For more information on the John Thackray Medal, see our previous blog post regarding the award and visit The Society for the History of Natural History website to see their official announcement of the award.

Originally uploaded by Smithsonian Libraries

Staff from the Biodiversity Heritage Library received the Outstanding Collaboration award from ALCTS on June 27, 2010.

The text of the citation read:

The Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) is awarding the ALCTS Outstanding Collaboration Citation to two distinguished libraries. This year’s recipients, in recognition of their outstanding collaborative partnerships are: the Biodiversity Heritage Library, the digitization component of the Encyclopedia of Life, which is a consortium of 12 major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries and research institutions organized to digitize, serve and preserve the legacy literature of biodiversity; and the Juliette K. and Leonard S. Rakow Research Library of The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning N.Y.

Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), in a noteworthy collaborative effort, has fulfilled a scholarly need by providing open access to a large corpus of historical materials on biodiversity within the biological, ecological and environmental sciences. BHL has grown into an international collaborative digitization project by working with 12 major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries and research institutions in the United States and United Kingdom. Through digitization and preservation, materials are made available, over an open access platform to scholars and researchers globally. The ability to locate, identify, retrieve the materials and, most importantly, to locate and identify specific organisms by their scientific names is seamless yet shows a high level of sophistication within BHL’s digital interface.

Pictured above, left to right are: Mary Case (President, ALCTS), Nancy E. Gwinn (Smithsonian Libraries), Tom Garnett (BHL/Smithsonian Libraries), Chris Freeland (BHL/Missouri Botanical Garden), Connie Rinaldo (Mayr Library, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University), Diana Duncan (The Field Museum, Chicago), Jane Smith (Natural History Museum, London), Matthew Person (Marine Biological Laboratory Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Library), Cynthia Whitacre (President Elect, ALCTS)