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  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
    • BHL at 20
  • User Stories
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    • Garden Stories
    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
  • Tech Blog
  • Visit BHL
Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL
BHL News, Blog Reel

Report on the 2016 BHL Annual meetings, London

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2016 BHL Group Photo

In conjunction with the BHL Day event at the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London, BHL partner representatives got down to work.

The combined 2016 BHL Joint Meeting was co-hosted by Natural History Museum, London and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 12-15 April 2016.

The first order of business was the 7th Global Meeting which took place on 12 April 2016 at the Natural History Museum. Representatives from all BHL’s global partners (with the exception of BHL México) were in attendance. A key outcome of this meeting was to merge the existing Global BHL group into the BHL as the newly formed BHL Global Committee (BGC). The BGC recommended to the BHL Executive Committee Anne-Lise Fourier (BHL Africa) as the Chair of this new committee. The BGC and global BHL concerns are also now instantiated in the BHL Bylaws and the BHL’s global partners will now have a clearer voice in the BHL.

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Zheping Xu & Jinzhong Cui
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Nancy E. Gwinn, Ely Wallis, Lawrence Monda

On the 13th, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew hosted the Open Partners Meeting where the Secretariat and Partners reported out on initiatives and accomplishments since the last meeting. Attendees included BHL Members, Affiliates, and Partners as well as a handful of invited guests including Dmitry Schigel from GBIF, Rod Page (BioStor), and Laurence Bénichou and Alice Lemaire (Natural History Museum of Paris). Bob Corrigan from the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) presented on current EOL activities and some plans for the 10th anniversary of EOL in 2017. The day concluded with a reception at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art where we were welcomed by Acting Librarian Fiona Ainsworth and Chris Mills (former Kew Librarian and representative to the BHL Members’ Council).

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BHL Open Partners Meeting, RBG Kew

On the 14th, the Members’ Business Meeting was held at NHM. The agenda included discussions of bylaws revisions, a report from the Global Business Meeting, discussions of user-feedback, interlibrary loan, and a report from the Membership Committee (Jane Smith). BHL took this opportunity to thank Marty Schlabach, who will retire later this year, for his service as the BHL representative from Cornell University Library; likewise Eric Chin (National Archives, Singapore) was recognized. Eric is stepping down from his role as BHL Singapore representative and is succeeded by Wai Yin Pryke (National Library of Singapore).

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Nancy E. Gwinn & Marty Schlabach
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Nancy E. Gwinn & Wai Yin Pryke

Slides from the Secretariat presentations are available here:

  • 2016 Program Director’s Report (Martin R. Kalfatovic)
  • 2016 Program Managers’ Report (Carolyn A. Sheffield)
  • 2016 Collections’ Managers’ Report (Bianca Crowley)
  • 2016 Outreach & Communications Manager’s Report (Grace Costantino)

Many thanks to Jane Smith (Natural History Museum), David Iggulden (Kew) and their teams for hosting these successful meetings and events!

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Nancy E. Gwinn, Jane Smith & David Iggulden

Selected other photos from the meeting:

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Nancy E. Gwinn & Fiona Ainsworth
Reception at RBG Kew
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Reception at RBG Kew
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Grace Costantino, Alison Harding, Constance Rinaldo
Periscope filming at Natural History Museum, Tring
May 10, 2016by
BHL News, Blog Reel

BHL in London!

Portrait version of the Biodiversity Heritage Library logo.

View Full Size ImageIt is no secret that the Biodiversity Heritage Library project has grown on a global scale, with BHL projects springing up in Europe, China, Australia, Brazil, and Egypt. Many of our new partners rely of the experience of BHL-US, as the original BHL project has come to be known, for insight and suggestions. One such partner is BHL-Europe, and a recent BHL-EU meeting in London proved to be a valuable opportunity to not only allow our European partners to gather and discuss various technical and workflow issues, but also to allow representatives from BHL-US to provide input based on our experience. With this intent, Bianca Crowley, Grace Costantino, and Chris Freeland, BHL-US staff, traveled to London for the latest BHL-Europe meeting on December 1-3, 2010.

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The main subjects comprising this recent meeting were workflow, technical issues and portal development, and the Global References Index to Biodiversity, also known as the GRIB. The intent of the GRIB is to serve as a single point of access to all biodiversity bibliographic records held within the library catalogues of the BHL-EU partners, which will in turn link to digitized versions of the content. The GRIB will also function as a selection and de-duplication tool for all BHL partners, allowing institutions to indicate which items they wish to scan while also providing digitization status information.

A wish to contribute to the development of the GRIB by providing insight into the workflow management tools currently in use on the project was a main purpose of BHL-US staff’s involvement in the meetings. By explaining how staff currently use the many tools necessary for scanning workflow in the US, and what specific tasks staff need a master workflow management tool to address, BHL-EU was able to understand the requirements of their partners across the Atlantic, and development of the GRIB was positively impacted by the conversations.

The meetings were a productive exercise in communication and collaboration, and served as an excellent opportunity to get to know colleagues that, until the meeting, were known only through emails and occasional Skype calls. As BHL continues to expand around the world, it is hoped that such cooperation will continue, and that we will all work together to share our experience, learn from our collective mistakes, and in general provide a better digital library to the users that depend so heavily on our resources for access to the biodiversity literature of the world.

December 8, 2010by ulib-libraryjobs

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About BHL

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”

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