2009_Accomplishments

BHL Accomplishments: 2009

• Staff Hire. January 5, 2009. Smithsonian Libraries hired a second BHL Library Technician, Erin Thomas.

• Staff Hire. February 17, 2009. BHL hired Collections Coordinator, Bianca Lipscomb.

• Meeting. March 9-10, 2009. Architecture Meeting March 9-10, Woods Hole

• BHL Portal. April 2009: Portal Improvements: Until now, letters that include diacritics (for example, ó, ö, è, é, û) were treated differently than letters without diacritics.What this meant is that in order to find titles, authors, or subjects that included diacritics, you had to search for an exact match on the diacritic... for example, to find all titles about "invertebrate zoology", you had to search twice: once for "invertebrate zoology" and once for "invertebrate zoölogy". (Or you had to search for something like "invertebrate zo" and hope you didn't get too much extra stuff in the search results.) Obviously, there are all sorts of problems with this limitation.
  
  
  Starting immediately, searches in the BHL portal are accent-insensitive, so no distinction is made between letters with and without diacritics. This means that a search for "invertebrate zoology" will now find all nine titles that contain either "invertebrate zoology" or "invertebrate zoölogy". See the search results here: http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/Search.aspx?searchTerm=invertebrate%20zoology&searchCat=. Another good example is searches for “Linne”, which now return instances of both “Linne” and “Linné”.
  
  
  This improved search functionality works on both the public-facing BHL portal and on the administration portion of BHL. While there is still more work to do to improve the search features, this is a good first step to improving the quality of our search results.

• Membership. May 21, 2009. The BHL Institutional Council voted to accept the membership applications of the Academy of Natural Sciences (Philadelphia) and the California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco).
• Publicity. May 29, 2009. Relaunched BHL Blog with new look and feel.

• Meeting. June 1-3, 2009. BHL staff (Tom Garnett, Chris Freeland, Connie Rinaldo) attend e-Biosphere Conference in London.
• Publicity. June 3, 2009. Created BHL Portal Tutorials on YouTube.
• Meeting. June 18-19, 2009. Internet Archive Scanning Center Quality Assurance Summit held at the New York Botanical Garden.
• Milestone. June 10, 2009. The MBLWHOI Library just officially passed another milestone in the BHL Portal, with over 10,000 books and over 4 million pages. Here are the exact numbers as of 6/10/09:
  • 3,134 titles
  • 10,026 items
  • 4,017,892 pages
  • 12,713,591 taxonomic names
  • over 7000 hours of time by all library staff members over the last 2 years
• Presentation, June 16, 2009. Nancy Gwinn spoke at a "Food for Thought" luncheon at the Smithsonian, sponsored by the Office of Development for donors, on digitization at the Smithsonian, with emphasis on the BHL and EOL projects.
• Meeting. June 29, 2009. BHL staff (Tom Garnett, Chris Freeland, Martin Kalfatovic) had a series of successful meetings with Internet Archive staff. Peter Brantley discussed the Internet Archive's work around the Google Books Settlement and other intellectual property issues. George Oates (former Flickr Commons creator and currently the lead developer for the Open Library project) discussed new ways to view bibliographic data that are being developed and ways to integrated digital books into a fuller and richer user experience. There was also a very interesting discussion with the Internet Archive engineering team (Raj, Mang, and Sam) on the topics of the Internet Archive developed book viewer and the S3 application for file loading to the Internet Archive computing clusters.
• Meeting. June 29, 2009. BHL staff (Tom Garnett, Chris Freeland, Martin Kalfatovic) met with Heather Christenson, Ivy Anderson, and Paul Fogel of the California Digital Library. Discussions centered on BHL harvesting of relevant scanning from CDL for integration into the BHL portal, activities revolving around the Hathi Trust project, and possible data sharing projects.

• Meeting. July 1, 2009. Martin Kalfatovic, Tom Garnett, Suzanne Pilsk (Smithsonian), and Chris Freeland (Missouri Botanical Garden) met with the library staff of the California Academy of Sciences (CAS). Attending for CAS were: Larry Curry (Library Director), Rebecca Morin (User Services Librarian), and Danielle Castronova (Archives & Digital Collections Librarian). The CAS is one of two new members of the BHL. Discussions centered on current BHL activities and how CAS staff can be integrated into the BHL functions.
• Presentation. July 9, 2009. Suzanne Pilsk and Bianca Lipscomb (Smithsonian) gave a presentation to 15 attendees at The Field Museum. Those attending were research interns (undergraduate and graduate students, scientific research staff of the Field, Field library staff, and 3 library staff from the Chicago Botanic Garden). BHL was well received by the group and a number of helpful suggestions and good contacts were made.
• Meeting. July 9, 2009. Martin Kalfatovic, Suzanne Pilsk and Bianca Lipscomb met with Elizabeth Babcock, Diana Duncan, and Christine Giannoni. The discussion centered on the Field's library collection, where they might assist with filling in BHL content, and crediting of Field content already in the BHL portal.
• Meeting. July 14, 2009. Chris Freeland and Tom Garnett attended the DuraCloud meeting in New York City.
• Meeting. July 15, 2009. Chris Freeland and Tom Garnett met with the staff at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.
• Publicity. July 21, 2009. Philadelphia Inquirer article about the Academy of Natural Sciences joining BHL "Adding Old Images to Biodiversity Database" [erratum - it should of course say type specimens, not type-set!]
• Presentation. A Botanical Introduction to The Biodiversity Heritage Library. Martin R. Kalfatovic. Botany & Mycology 2009. July 26, 2009. Snowbird, UT.

• Meeting. Chris Freeland attends BHL Europe Technical meeting in Leiden (August 2009)
• Meeting. BHL / BHL Europe technical and metadata meeting in St. Louis (August 17-21, 2009)
• Presentation. Global BHL. Tom Garnett. Missouri Botanical Garden Staff Meeting. August 19, 2009. Saint Louis, MO.
• Presentation.The Biodiversity Heritage Library: Corn-fed, Missouri Raised, Going Global. Martin R. Kalfatovic. Missouri Botanical Garden Staff Meeting. August 19, 2009. Saint Louis, MO.

• Paper. Rinaldo, Constance and Catherine Norton. "The Biodiversity Heritage Library: An Expanding International Collaboration." 2009 Proceedings. International Association of Aquatic and Marine Science Information centers. 35th Annual Conference of IAMSLIC held 27 September - 1 October, 2009 at Brugge, Belgium. [online ]

• BHL nominated for the 2010 Outstanding Collaboration Citation given by the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services section of the American Library Association.