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!

We had a very good 3rd ICADLA meeting in Ifrane, Morocco. As part of the Advisory Committee, I was very pleased with the over all program (though disappointed that there was so much confusion in having a representative from the Google Cultural Institute and then the person ended up not attending).

The opening keynote, by Misako Ito (UNESCO Office for Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania and Tunisia) provided a good kick off to the meeting.

Next up was a special panel presentation by members of the Global Biodiversity Heritage Library community. I moderated the panel and the presenters included Nancy Gwinn (Smithsonian Libraries/BHL), Ely Wallis (Museum Victoria/BHL Australia), Anne-Lise Fourie (SANBI/BHL Africa), Magdy Nagi (Bib. Alex/BHL Egypt), Jiri Frank (National Museum, Prague/BHL Europe), and William Ulate (Missouri Botanical Garden/BHL).

Here’s the abstract for the panel:

Creating a Global Biodiversity Heritage Library

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), originally formed in 2006 with twelve U.S. and U.K. museum and botanical garden libraries, has grown to incorporate regionally-based global nodes in Europe, Australia, South America, Egypt, China, and most recently Africa. BHL now globally aggregates nearly 40 million pages of biodiversity literature representing over 110,000 volumes. Including both pre-Linnean (i.e. 1753) and contemporary volumes, the BHL allows life-science researchers to find important references to the planet’s biodiversity. Created to provide open and free access to the published literature of biodiversity, the BHL serves as a model for a large-scale curated digital library collection. Coordinating content selection, digitization, and post-digitization service to a world-wide audience. Recent projects have started to identify illustrations that have a user-base beyond the core-science community of BHL to a wider audience of school children and life-long learners. Topics to be discussed in this panel include strategies for creating and maintaining a multinational digital library program; digitization platforms and services; creating value-added features for discipline-specific digital libraries; use of social media and outreach to increase use and build new audiences; and migration of projects to sustainable programs. This session will include participation from BHL global partners from Africa, Egypt, the United States, and Australia. A one hour time slot would be preferable for this session. Presenter from the BHL Africa project will be finalized shortly.

Here’s my presentation (thanks to Bianca Crowley for suggesting that title). [others are planned to be added]

The first day was then filled with breakout sessions on the topics of “Policy and Skills Development,” “National and Collaborative Projects”, and “Institutional Experiences”. The day concluded with a gala dinner and local Berber music and dancing at the Al Akhawayne University Faculty Club.

Day two began with an excellent presentation by Driss Khrouz, Director of the National Library of the Kingdom of Morocco. Mr. Khrouz covered the development of the Moroccan Digital Library, particularly in relation to manuscripts. He also discussed relations between Morocco and other national libraries as well as issues around theft and black market sales of Moroccan manuscripts. Mr. Khrouz is a passionate advocate for libraries and made a passionate plea for increasing library services in Morocco to promote overall literacy. Too many children do not have a place to read and too many universities are not devoting resources to libraries.

I then participated in the panel discussion on “A Roadmap for Digitization in Africa”. The topics generated out of that panel (and the roadmap document) fed three breakout sessions that discussed the topics in more depth and which were then presented in a plenary reporting session.

The meeting ended with a final statement by Felix Ubogu and Abraham Azubuike, representing the ICADLA Standing Committee.

Thank you to Felix Ubogu, Michelle Pickover and Gabriele (Wits) and the rest of the ICADLA steering committee. And also a special thanks to our hosts at the Al Akhawayn University Library for wonderful local logistics: Abdelhamid Lotfi, Hanane Karkour, and the other staff of the library.