All posts tagged with meetings

The 2024 Biodiversity Heritage Library Annual Meeting saw BHL partners and interested parties returning to Chicago, Illinois, the location of many BHL gatherings over the years. This year’s meeting was also significant as it coincided with the dual emergence of Brood XIII of Periodical Cicadas (Magicicada) and Brood XIX elsewhere in Illinois and the Midwest.

Attendees were welcomed to Chicago by our co-hosts, The Field Museum of Natural History and the Chicago Botanic Garden. Throughout the week of 13 May to 17 May, attendees were treated to behind-the-scenes tours at both locations. The BHL Day 2024 Symposium, Year of the Cicada: Buzzing with 17 Years of Biodiversity Achievements, took advantage of the emergence of the Magicicada Brood XIII emergence and featured Magicicada expert, Dr. Gene Kritsky, as keynote speaker.

Originally scheduled for 2020, the BHL Annual Meeting finally made it to Paris after two years of virtual meetings and a break to hold the 2022 BHL Annual Meeting in conjunction with the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) and the Natural Sciences Collections Society (NatSCA) meetings in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The host for the 2023 meeting was the library of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle (MNHN), led by Alice Lemaire, Clément Oury, and Gildas Illien. The meeting took place 17-21 April 2023 and included BHL business meetings, tours of library and museum sites, and a BHL symposium titled “Fostering Data Driven Natural Science through Open Digital Libraries”. In total, the meeting gathered 38 attendees (both in-person and virtually) from 22 BHL partners from around the world.

For the first time, the Biodiversity Heritage Library held its annual meeting in conjunction with a major biodiversity/natural sciences organization. In June 2022, BHL joined with the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) and the Natural Sciences Collections Society (NatSCA) to host our meetings in Edinburgh, Scotland. Recognizing that the global pandemic had forced so many meetings to turn to virtual, we were fortunate to have this 2022 meeting as a hybrid virtual/in-person event.

Like many organizations around the world, the Biodiversity Heritage Library was compelled, for the second year in a row, to move the 2021 BHL Annual Meeting to a virtual environment. In consultation with our prospective 2021 host, the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris, the BHL Executive Committee again made the difficult, yet necessary, decision to move to a virtual meeting, but one that would be much enhanced from 2020 with a goal of trying to recreate the interaction and programmatic content of our in-person meetings.

In October 2019, more than 700 people from over 75 countries gathered in Leiden, the Netherlands for Biodiversity_Next, a joint conference by GBIF, DISSCo, iDigBio, CETAF, TDWG, and LifeWatch Eric. Hosted by the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, a BHL Affiliate, in collaboration with the Netherlands Biodiversity Information Facility, the main conference ran from 22-25 October 2019, with pre-conference workshops occurring 20-21 October, as well as organization-specific meetings for GBIF, CETAF, and TDWG being held in conjunction with the conference. Eighteen BHL-affiliated representatives from our partner community, representing 13 institutions from nine countries, attended the conference, and 11 BHL-affiliated staff presented or moderated 16 talks or sessions. Dr. Elycia Wallis (Atlas of Living Australia; BHL Member representative for BHL Australia) served as a key member of the Programme Committee. Members of the BHL Executive Committee (EC) and colleagues from the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle represented BHL at the various organizational meetings, including GBIF, TDWG, and CETAF.

Martin Kalfatovic (BHL Program Director) and Connie Rinaldo (Chair of the BHL Members’ Council) attended and presented a poster at the recent Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) meeting held 25-31 May 2019 and hosted by the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois. The theme of the meeting was “Making the Case for Natural History Collections”.

Connie Rinaldo also attended the Digital Data in Biodiversity meeting hosted by the Yale Peabody Museum 10-12 June 2019. She presented a poster on behalf of herself and Martin Kalfatovic.

The 2019 BHL Annual Meeting was held 29 April – 3 May in Ithaca, New York. Hosted by the Albert R. Mann Library of Cornell University, the Meeting brought together 34 participants from 23 institutions, representing 9 countries.

As BHL Program Director Martin Kalfatovic noted: “The BHL Annual meeting is an opportunity for the partners, from all over the world, to come together to chart the course of the BHL for the coming year. The conversations, both formal and informal, are key to keeping the Library relevant to both its global user community and the partners that sustain the BHL.”

The meeting agenda included reports on the state of the consortium, facilitated discussions around key program areas, a strategic planning session, a panel session with BHL partner representatives, a public event with a panel of Cornell scientists, and many amazing tours and excursions.