All posts tagged with global-bhl

BHL is thrilled to welcome CONABIO as its newest Member and Global Node! Comisión Nacional para el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad (National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity, or CONABIO) joined on December 16, 2014 and will also serve as the BHL’s newest global node, BHL Mexico. CONABIO brings a strong conservation perspective and is positioned to help expand BHL’s reach to Spanish-speaking communities. To kickoff their membership, CONABIO hosted representatives from BHL Central, December 15 – 17, at their offices in Mexico City.

BHL Australia and the Melbourne Museum hosted “BHL Day” at the museum on 31 January 2014. Representatives of all the global BHL nodes (with the exception of BHL Egypt) were in attendance. BHL members were joined by staff and volunteers from BHL Australia as well as from the Atlas of Living Australia. The day began with Caroline Martin, Bunjilaka Manager at the Melbourne Museum who welcomed the group with a traditional welcome from the indigenous people of Australia. Tim Hart, Acting CEO of the Melbourne Museum gave a welcome to the day’s events.

Dr. Geoffrey Mwachala, Director, Research and Collection at the National Museum of Kenya, stopped to visit Martin Kalfatovic and Nancy Gwinn while in Washington on other biodiversity and museum collections business at the Smithsonian. While at Smithsonian Libraries, he was able to visit the scanning facility in the National Museum of Natural History and see some of the BHL digitization operations in action. Dr. Mwachala is a strong supporter of BHL Africa and the expansion of biodiversity knowledge.

BHL is a collaborative endeavor, no doubt about it; and it’s been thanks to these collaborations that we have the technical achievements we have. For many reasons, this is a good time to be thankful. So as the BHL Technical Director, I would like to start by thanking my colleagues.

The Biodiversity Information Standards group, also known as TDWG, holds an annual conference every year in a different city around the globe. This year it was held in Florence Italy from October 28th 2013-November 1st 2013. It was my first opportunity to attend the TDWG conference. The conference theme was “virtual communities for biodiversity science” which spoke to me of the increasing opportunities in sharing and connecting biodiversity data via the semantic web environment. I particularly enjoyed the keynote talk by Eric Meyer of the Oxford Internet Institute where researchers study the social implications of the Internet from different domain perspectives.