Participants at the BHL-Africa Meeting, June 14-15, 2012, Cape Town, South Africa.

The mission of the Biodiversity Heritage Library is to build an open access digital library of biodiversity literature for the world. For the past several years, the BHL has been building upon its global network of partners, and on June 14-15, 2012, over 25 librarians, scientists and information technology managers came together at Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden to discuss the possibilities for developing a BHL node in Africa. This organization and planning meeting was generously funded by the JRS Biodiversity Foundation and was a direct follow up to the initial JRS funded meetings hosted by the Biodiversity Synthesis Center/Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago in November, 2011.

Six representatives from the BHL U.S./U.K. node were present to provide an introduction to the BHL, report on the current global environment and  lead important breakout discussions regarding various administrative and technical aspects of the BHL. As always, BHL staff actively promoted the project and generated the enthusiasm required to engage the participants. BHL Technical Director Chris Freeland (who unfortunately could not attend the meetings) created this excellent video to rally the meeting participants.

A working day at the BHL-Africa meeting.

The objectives for the two days of discussion included: the identification of the scope and magnitude of African biodiversity literature collections, the creation of a project plan for coordinated digitization, as well as identifying the local digitization capacity among the attendees’ institutions. The first day of discussion was focused upon learning more about the attendees’ backgrounds, the current digitization activities in their institutions and how the creation of a BHL Africa would impact their work or the work of others in their institutions. Grace Costantino, BHL Program Manager, Smithsonian Institution Libraries, and Christine Giannoni, Museum Librarian from the Field Museum, conducted several video interviews that you can view here.

Nancy Gwinn leading the Governance Breakout Group.

The second day of discussion was divided into the following four breakout groups: Governance, led by Nancy Gwinn, Director, Smithsonian Institution Libraries; Infrastructure, led by William Ulate, Global BHL Project Manager, Missouri Botanical Garden; Scanning, led by Martin Kalfatovic, BHL Program Director, Smithsonian Institution Libraries; and Collaboration, led by Anne-Lise Fourie, Assistant Director, SANBI Libraries. These sessions really got down to “brass tacks” and identified the needs, strengths and opportunities among the various institutions. While the need for stable technological infrastructure was a common concern, it was noted that this was on a positive trajectory in several countries. Participants felt that their institutions hold a tremendous amount of materials that have not been digitized, including: gray literature, materials published in Africa with low distribution, as well as unpublished literature.

Several key themes emerged from the two days of discussion:

• the desire for open access to scientific literature.
• with people across the continent embracing mobile technology, these digitized resources must be adapted for mobile technology.
• the “BHL in a Box” concept was highly desired. This would entail creating interactive CDs of BHL content for distribution in areas where internet access is unreliable or unavailable.

The meetings concluded with a high level of excitement and several tasks for moving BHL Africa forward. The ultimate long-term goal is to provide open access biodiversity literature to African researchers as well as to establish a BHL Africa project organized by Africans and operated in Africa. A “Concept Document” created by the Governance breakout group is being used as a basis for a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). Participants hope to regroup at Stellenbosch University (in conjunction with Berlin 10) in fall 2012 to finalize an MOU and officially launch BHL-Africa.

Pictures courtesy Martin Kalfatovic

Today we feature the last 4 of 17 conference attendee interviews from the Life and Literature conference. We hope you’ve enjoyed this opportunity to see what those present at the conference had to say about it and BHL. You can see these and all other interviews on the Life and Literature website.

Don’t forget to share your thoughts about Life and Literature via our Titan Pad discussion pages, and also take a look at conference notes and speaker presentations on the website.

We would like to extend a special thanks to Jennifer Rubin, Matthew Regan, and Bianca Crowley for conducting these interviews, and to all those who participated and shared their valuable thoughts with us.

Karen Baker:

Matthew Person:

Vladimir Blagoderov:

Mary Ochs:

Continuing with our theme, here are the next 4 of 17 conference attendee interviews from the Life and Literature conference. The first three feature recipients of the JRS African digitization scholarship, which funded the expenses of nine visitors from Africa to both attend the conference and an additional meeting on Wednesday (Nov. 16th) with the express purpose of discussing biodiversity literature digitization in Africa (expect more information on this meeting in a future post). The fourth interview is that of Dr. Jinzhong Cui, the director of BHL-China. All interviews are available on the Life and Literature website.

Don’t forget to share your thoughts about Life and Literature via our Titan Pad discussion pages, and also take a look at conference notes and speaker presentations on the website.

We would like to extend a special thanks to Jennifer Rubin, Matthew Regan, and Bianca Crowley for conducting these interviews, and to all those who participated and shared their valuable thoughts with us.

Dorothy Wanja Nyingi:

Ashah Owano:

Willem Coetzer:

Dr. Jinzhong Cui:

Now we present the next 3 of 17 conference attendee interviews from the Life and Literature conference. All of these interviews are available on the Life and Literature website.

Don’t forget to share your thoughts about Life and Literature via our Titan Pad discussion pages, and also take a look at conference notes and speaker presentations on the website. If you attended the Life and Literature conference, be sure to take the survey, which will be closing November 30th.

We would like to extend a special thanks to Jennifer Rubin, Matthew Regan, and Bianca Crowley for conducting these interviews, and to all those who participated and shared their valuable thoughts with us.

Natalia Zamora:

Alex Asase:

Marty Schlabach:

Continuing with our posting of the Life and Literature conference attendee interviews, below you will find the next 3 out of the 17 interviews, all of which are available on the Life and Literature website.

Don’t forget to share your thoughts about Life and Literature via our Titan Pad discussion pages, and also take a look at conference notes and speaker presentations on the website. If you attended the Life and Literature conference, be sure to take the survey, which will be closing November 30th.

We would like to extend a special thanks to Jennifer Rubin, Matthew Regan, and Bianca Crowley for conducting these interviews, and to all those who participated and shared their valuable thoughts with us.

Ely Wallis:

Sue Ann Gardner:

Chris Wildrick:

If you happened to be living under a rock for the past two weeks and missed our blog posts, tweets, and posts on Facebook, you might have missed the fact that last week was the Life and Literature Conference, an event hosted by BHL with the express purpose of generating conversations about the priorities for biodiversity literature digitization, particularly as it pertains to BHL, for the next 4-5 years. The conference, which took place November 14-15, 2011, in Chicago, IL, brought together interested parties in a variety of disciplines, including science, education, informatics, and the humanities. Lively discussions and insightful presentations ensued both days, with dozens of live tweets (hashtag #lifelit) constantly streaming for those who could not participate in person.

The conference was divided into four panel discussions, followed on the second day by break-out sessions that allowed attendees to delve deeply into the various topics discussed during panel sessions, ultimately leading to an outline of the various areas deemed most important for BHL to focus on in the next 4-5 years. The four panel sessions included “Research, Informatics, and the Published Record;” “Publishers, Aggregators, and Authors – New Models and Access;” “Learning and Education;” and “Building Collaborative Networks for Science and the Humanities through Scientific Literature.” A synopsis of the four panels can be found on the Life and Literature site, as well as a list of each of the presenters and their biographies. Session presentations are being loaded to the BHL wiki and can be accessed on the Presentations page. Notes from the sessions can be found on the Life and Literature website. You can also view interviews of conference attendees on the website.

In order to facilitate a discussion with the audience during panel and breakout sessions, BHL staff used an application called Titan Pad, which provides a collaborative environment that allows anyone to access a document to view, edit, or make comments in real time. There were Titan Pad pages for each of the panels and breakouts, and live notes, as well as live discussion, occurred via those avenues. These pages remain live, and we encourage anyone interested to continue the discussion in the weeks to come!

While many ideas and themes resulted from the discussion generated at the conference, perhaps the most recurring topic involved the connection between science and the humanities. Presentations by speakers at the Humanities panel highlighted some of the possible intersections between art and science, and each breakout session touched upon the various ways that BHL could partner with the humanities and make the biodiversity illustrations already in BHL more accessible. The BHL Flickr site, which currently houses more than 20,000 images, was a huge success, and attendees discussed additional ideas about how BHL could further promote its illustrations and engage the arts and humanities communities. Such ideas as specific image searching interfaces, image-specific collections, and collaborations with artist communities were discussed, and BHL staff outlined some art-related grant projects currently in the works.

The winner of the Life and Literature Code Challenge was also presented at the conference. The Code Challenge asked users to create applications that would use, disseminate, or display BHL data in new and meaningful ways. The winner? Ryan Schenk, with his application Synynyms. Synynyms works as a taxonomic name aggregator, finding all of the different names given to a species over the years and displaying the frequency of each name variety throughout history. The names are provided by the Encyclopedia of Life, and the publications come from, you guessed it, BHL! Congratulations to Ryan, and thanks for sharing such an awesome tool with us!

Last, but certainly not least, two new members of the BHL family were announced, Cornell University Library and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) Libraries. With these new members joining the fold the BHL consortium is now 14 members strong! Stay tuned for more information about BHL’s newest members to come in future posts.