All posts tagged with program-director

It’s time to say farewell to my official time with the Biodiversity Heritage Library! As I outlined in my presentation at the 2024 BHL Annual Meeting, when I took over as BHL Program Director in April 2012, I had a firm and successful organization to lead. And all that success rests on the shoulders of the countless staff in BHL partner organizations around the world.

This month (April 2022) marks my tenth year as the BHL Program Director. Over the past 10 years, we’ve seen a lot of change — and a lot of growth — with the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Taking over from our first Program Director, Tom Garnett, was a daunting challenge. Tom led the initial funding of BHL through the MacArthur Foundation grant with the Encyclopedia of Life and the establishment of BHL as a global consortium.

Among my first tasks as BHL Program Director was to build on that legacy with the transition of BHL from a grant funded organization to a member-driven one. Likewise, those first months of my tenure saw the close out of the BHL Europe project (which led to our continued strong European presence) and the planning meetings (and later launch) of BHL Africa.

BHL Program Director Martin Kalfatovic was invited to participate in a symposium, hosted by JSTOR Global Plants, at Botany 2018 in Rochester, MN entitled The Future of Digital Projects for Research & Teaching in Botany.

The symposium addressed questions such as: what existing digital projects in botany have been successful and how did they become so; what areas of need should future projects explore; how do we define success for digital projects; how do digital projects directed at students differ from those aimed at the researcher; how can we use digital projects to reach new students and interested lay people; and how are new digital projects funded and supported for the long term.