More than a month ago, on May 27 and 28, we took the opportunity to have our Global BHL Meeting in Fez, Morocco, because some of us were on our way to ICADLA-3, the 3rd International Conference on African Digital Libraries and Archives in Ifrane later that week.  This year, it was particularly special, not only because we had a superb backstage, staying and meeting in a Dar in the old Medina, but also because at least one representative of each BHL Node (except for Brazil) managed to converge for the occasion in such a historic city and they all had something big to report from their annual achievements.

Global BHL Attendees

It was very inspiring to hear all the reports highlights and share about common global topics for our initiative: from award-winning volunteers digitizing in Australia to the dedicated colleagues generating Chinese OCR and manually tagging common names; from the laborious staff scanning a whole library in Brazil in just a few months to the quick generation of online exhibitions with BHL material in Europe; and from the development of Macaw, a specialized tool to upload selected material to our collection in a much easier way, created in the US with collaboration from Australia and Brazil, to the implementation of full-search text, annotations and underlining capabilities on the Arabic portal by Egypt – all these achievements crowned with the establishment of a continental BHL node by and for African colleagues in less than a year… for me, this is priceless!

We stayed at Dar Fes Medina

I gave a presentation for the Technical Update, explaining how having the user interface, initially developed by the BHL-Australia staff, now available on top of the BHL-US/UK functionality, is much more than a mere change of look. There’s new functionality made available by providing access to article-level information and more taxa is now found through the services of the Global Names Architecture project (supported by the National Science Foundation) to provide for a closer integration with authors lists and taxa aggregators like Zoobank and IPNI, among others.  And these are just the tips of the iceberg.  The continuous growth of the BHL corpus at a steady rate for more than 5 years, echoes the work of all those who support BHL and reflects the value of our staff contributions and the usage of our content that our users promote by creating references that link to it.  I ended my talk with a mention of the latest developments on several of our projects, like our NEH-funded Art of Life.

Newly elected gBHL Vice-Chair Jiri Frank (BHL-E) and Dr. Jinzhou Cui (BHL-China)

But it hasn’t been a year without challenges of all sorts: the end of funding for some projects, staff turnover, priority changes, and even political turmoil… During this time, our colleagues from the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole have managed to solve previous issues with the performance of our content copy on their Cluster repository.  BHL-Europe has also solved some issues it had that slowed down the process to upload files and now it’s steadily ingesting content, thanks to their Organizations’ support and sometimes even personal effort and interest to maintain the project going on.  BHL-China has also found a renewed interest in providing services to other institutions through novel projects.  BHL-Australia has empowered collaborations with their volunteers’ network and BHL-Egypt has kept advancing the replication of content with firm commitment to their participation, even after major changes in the country.  Needless to explain, the challenges that BHL Africa had to overcome in order to have, in less than a year, 12 institutions from different countries eager to establish a new node and sign up the Memorandum of Understanding to participate in such effort by the time of the launch inauguration.  But changes are opportunities, and the obstacles faced only makes it even more important and valuable to recognize the wonderful contributions and achievements that have been carried out around the globe in the last 12 months by our BHL community.

gBHL Chair Nancy Gwinn and Program Director Martin Kalfatovic (BHL-US/UK)

The Global BHL is a cooperative network of autonomous members operating programs and projects to make biodiversity literature available under principles of open access, collaboration, decentralization, interoperability, transparency and legality, and I believe it is its diversity that makes it resilient to obstacles in a particular node.  For me, this is the reason why, even in times of adversity, it has always been growing, increasing not only in size, but also developing in more regions, with more languages, topics and types of content and adapting to technology changes, improving or developing new tools and synchronizing content among nodes, even after the original project (and funding) from The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for Global BHL Coordination ended last year.

BHL Global Coordinator  William Ulate and Anne-Lise Fourie (BHL-Africa)

Now better and higher goals are already established. BHL-Australia and BHL-Europe want to reactivate and adapt their own projects to expand to new institutions and collections.  BHL-Africa and BHL-Brazil have the goal of starting to upload their digitized content and expand participation to other countries.  Likewise, BHL-China also wants to extend their content and services to new topics of their scientific community. BHL-Egypt is interested in integrating content with other global initiatives and exploring joint projects, while BHL-US/UK is looking to consolidate its new framework of membership and expand the services provided to their users.  Learning from each other’s successes and experiences helps us to keep working together, ensure redundancy and resilience, while at the same time increasing new unique content, tools and services that provide novel opportunities for collaborations.

gBHL Chair Ely Wallis (BHL-AU), Dr. Magdy Nagi (BHL-Egypt) and gBHL Secretary Nancy Gwinn (BHL-US/UK)

Every time I return from our Annual Global BHL Meeting, I come back full of positivism and ideas, proud to be part of this global initiative that involves so many amazing people collaborating from so many different places.  I have met a lot of people, but not all of them yet, I have to say; and to be fair with them, I have avoided singling out anyone here, but having the privilege, at least once a year, to share together with all the Global BHL representatives about the work their colleagues do and hear about their contributions to this worldwide endeavor, is a real treat for me…

I hope you also enjoyed it!

BHL-Africa logo at Pretoria National Botanical Garden

On April 15, 2013, BHL-Africa officially launched. BHL-Africa’s mission is to provide open access to the valuable biodiversity literature found within African libraries and institutions. The African consortium is hard at work identifying partners throughout the continent to sign an MOU and commit to working towards this noble objective.

The three-day BHL-Africa launch and workshop was hosted by the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) at the Pretoria National Botanical Garden in Pretoria, South Africa, from April 15-17, 2013. The meetings occurred simultaneously with the GBIF meetings also held at the botanical garden last week. Over two dozen representatives from institutions that have either signed or intend to sign the BHL-Africa MOU were present. Additionally, six colleagues from the BHL-US/UK program node were invited to attend: Nancy Gwinn (Director, Smithsonian Libraries, BHL Executive Committee Chair); Constance Rinaldo (Director, MCZ-Harvard Library, BHL Executive Committee Vice-Chair); Doug Holland (Director, Missouri Botanical Garden Library); William Ulate (Missouri Botanical Garden, BHL Technical Director); Bianca Crowley (Smithsonian Libraries, BHL Collections Coordinator); and Grace Costantino (Smithsonian Libraries, BHL Program Manager).

Monday, April 15, began with a launch ceremony, detailed in our blog post last week, during which the BHL MOU with SANBI was signed by Dr. Nancy Gwinn and Dr. Tanya Abrahamse (SANBI CEO). The real work began after the launch, with the start of the BHL-Africa workshop.

Dr. Nancy Gwinn and Dr. Tanya Abrahamse sign the BHL-Africa MOU

Day one of the workshop (Monday, April 15, afternoon) was devoted to addressing final MOU questions and outlining participants’ expectations for the meeting. Key expectations and areas in need of discussion included: Clarifying BHL’s open access policy and its implications for African participants; a concise description of the value of BHL for participating institutions in order to secure managerial buy-in; organization of clear fundraising strategies; the need for extensive training; identification of available resources and digitization capacity building; and the best way to collaborate and share resources amongst participating members. Overall meeting expectations were to elect a BHL-Africa Steering Committee and establish an outline for a two-year work plan.

The BHL-Africa Group Photo!

Much of day two (Tuesday, April 16) was spent investigating workflow and organizational questions, including collections development, copyright, communication, and infrastructure. The primary reason for the presence of the BHL-US/UK team was to offer our African colleagues the expertise we have gained in these areas over the past six years, as well as to help define global expectations for our new members.

Towards this end, Nancy Gwinn began by identifying four main expectations for BHL-Africa: Content Creation; Audience Building; Content Identification; and Partnership Building. In short, these expectations translate to not only growing the BHL corpus by digitizing African collections, but also helping BHL identify content to scan, both within and outside of Africa. Furthermore, BHL Africa must work to both build the BHL audience by promoting the project throughout the continent, but also expand the BHL consortium by identifying institutions that can contribute to the initiative.

Constance Rinaldo then gave a presentation on copyright, defining public domain, open access, and the Creative Commons licenses employed by BHL-US/UK. She was quick to stress, however, that each BHL node and institution must follow the copyright laws of their own countries, and, as BHL is not a legal entity, it is ultimately each scanning institution that is legally responsible for the content they contribute to the collection.

Bianca Crowley on BHL Collections Development

Bianca Crowley then gave our African colleagues some insight into the BHL-US/UK collection development process, outlining our selection and de-duplication process, digitization principles, metadata requirements, and content integration. Communication and collaboration methods were a key point of discussion, as they are critical for successful collections development.

Grace Costantino followed with a presentation on BHL-US/UK’s use of social media, which allows us to communicate project developments, provide context to the books in our collection, reach new audiences on new platforms, and uncover hidden gems in our collection. Following the presentation, an open discussion about each institution’s current use of social media, social media in the context of Africa, and how BHL-Africa might use social media occurred.

Finally, William Ulate detailed the BHL infrastructure, demoing the Macaw tool developed by Joel Richard at the Smithsonian Libraries, which is used to ingest books through Internet Archive into BHL. A remote installation of Macaw is running at the University of Pretoria and can be accessed via the web by any BHL-Africa participant to load digitized content into BHL.

BHL-African participants were also given a chance, on day two, to break out into two working groups, dedicated to Collections Development/Copyright and Outreach/Communication. These sessions allowed participants to apply the information given during the presentations to the realities of the BHL-Africa project.

The final day of the meeting (Wednesday, April 17) was spent identifying preliminary tasks for a two-year BHL-Africa workplan and electing a BHL-Africa Steering Committee. Workplan components include establishing a list of titles that each institution wishes to contribute to BHL; drafting documentation, based largely on existing files from gBHL, for workflow and collaboration guidance; and drafting a preliminary communication and outreach plan, which addresses not only external, but also internal, communication needs.

BHL-Africa Steering Committee (Left to Right): Lawrence Monda (Technical Advisor), Ashah Owano, Loi Namugenyi, Anne-Lise Fourie, Ria Groenewald

The BHL-Africa Steering Committee was also elected at the meeting. BHL-Africa has been divided into three regional nodes: North/Central; Eastern; Southern. Each regional node elects two representatives for the Steering Committee. Currently, there is no representation in North/Central Africa within the project, so only four members (two from Southern, two from Eastern) were elected at the meeting. Elected members include: Anne-Lise Fourie (SANBI, Southern); Ria Groenewald (University of Pretoria, Southern); Ashah Owano (National Museums of Kenya, Eastern); and Loi Namugenyi (Uganda National Council for Science and Technology, Eastern). Lawrence Monda (National Museums of Kenya) was elected as the BHL-Africa Technical Representative. Two additional members will be elected as North/Central institutions are added to the BHL fold. The Steering Committee will be responsible for providing strategic guidance, developing fundraising plans and approving budgets, and organizing pan-continental efforts.

The three-day BHL-Africa launch and workshop was an extremely successful event which resulted in the creation of an actionable plan for project development and the identification of notably capable leadership. Meeting attendees left feeling energized, with a clear sense of purpose. Just one and a half years ago, at the Life and Literature conference, the concept of BHL-Africa was born. Today, it is a reality. We congratulate our colleagues on the astounding progress they have made and look forward to seeing great things from BHL-Africa!

BHL-Australia Screenshot

The newest addition to the BHL global family, BHL-Australia, has now launched. BHL in Australia is the digital literature component of the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), a national project that aims to make biodiversity information more accessible and useable on line. It is a partnership between CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, the Australian natural history collections community and the Australian Government.

The Australian node project is being managed through Museum Victoria, based in Melbourne. Dr Elycia Wallis, the BHL Australia node team lead said “We are so pleased to have an Australian BHL node up and running. Now the fun part of developing new tools and functionality can start so that we can share these back to the global BHL community.” The Australian node has taken the core BHL code and reworked it with a redesigned user interface. Designer Simon O’Shea and developer Michael Mason at Museum Victoria wanted to concentrate on providing the core functionality of BHL as well as giving an Australian feel to the site design by using many beautiful images of Australian native species.

Online developer Michael Mason Source: Museum Victoria

New Australian scanning operations are just getting underway but we expect that, with many thousands of references to Australian species already in BHL references, Australian scanning will be a targeted activity. Museum Victoria, with new book-scanning equipment, will be leading the development of new scanning projects starting with the complete archive of Memoirs of Museum Victoria containing the first scientific descriptions of many Victorian animal species.

• BHL-Australia site
• Follow the Atlas of Living Australia on Twitter