2010 Accomplishments

January

Funding. January 2010. Smithsonian Institution Libraries received $1.5 million from the Smithsonian’s Atherton Seidell Endowment Fund to support SIL’s participation in the Biodiversity Heritage Library Project for 2010-2014. Previously, the Seidell Endowment supported SIL’s work on BHL with $200,000 for 2007-2009.
Meeting. January 2010. Tom Garnett, Cathy Norton, Chris Freeland, and Phil Cryer met with staff of BHL China in Beijing.
Smithsonian Institution bulk loaded over 4,000 links into the local ILS linking scanned Smithsonian owned material to the BHL
Issued final report for IMLS planning grant: Retooling special collections scanning in the age of mass digitization IMLS final reportFINAL.doc

February

Paper/Presentation. Name Matters: Taxonomic Name Recognition (TNR) in Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) . Qin Wei, P. Bryan Heidorn, and Chris Freeland. iConference 2010 Papers.
Award. February 23, 201. Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Rakow Research Library of The Corning Museum of Glass receive ALCTS collaboration citations. Details
Conference/Presentation. February 9, 2010. Building a Global Library of Taxonomic Literature. XXVIII Congresso Brasileiro de Zoologia. Martin R. Kalfatovic. 9 February 2010. Belém, Brazil.
Meeting. February 3-5, 2010. Tom Garnett, Chris Freeland and Martin Kalfatovic attended the Workshop Coleção de Obras Raras Essencial in São Paulo, Brazil. Program information available here.
- An Overview of Activities and Projects: The Biodiversity Heritage Library. Martin R. Kalfatovic. Workshop Coleção de Obras Raras Essencial. 3-5 February 2010. São Paulo, Brazil.
The Ernst Mayr Library hired a Metadata Librarian to work on improving and enhancing Harvard/BHL metadata.

March

Award. BHL Named ALA's Digital Library of the Week (March 17, 2010). The Biodiversity Heritage Library, the digitization component of the Encyclopedia of Life, is a consortium of 12 major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions organized to digitize, serve, and preserve the legacy literature of biodiversity. Content consists primarily of books and periodicals in the public domain, and is searchable and browsable by title, author, subject, scientific name, location, and year of publication. All images are downloadable and free for noncommercial use under a Creative Commons license. The European Commission’s eContentPlus program has recently funded the BHL-Europe project, with 22 institutions, to assemble the European language literature. Negotiations are being pursued with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Atlas of Living Australia and contacts in Japan, India, and Russia to join the BHL consortium. Prior to digitization, the resources housed within each BHL institution have existed in isolation, available only to those with physical access to the collections. In November 2009, the collection added more than 21,000 new titles as a result of ingesting open-access texts scanned by the Internet Archive. The collection now includes some 2 million volumes.
Meeting. March 22, 2010. BHL Institutional Council met at AMNH.

April

Publicity. "Project enables access to essential rare works in biodiversity" and "Project enables access to essential rare works in biodiversity (Part II)". Biblioteca Virtual em Saude - BVS. Newsletter. 9 April 2010

May

Meeting. BHL Europe First Annual Review. Vienna, Austria. 25-29 May 2010.

June

Meeting. BHL Australia Node Kick-off meeting. Melbourne and Canberra, Australia. 1-4 June 2010
Article. "Biodiversity Heritage Library Visitors" Melbourne Museum News. 8 June 2010. Online
Article. "ALA signs on with the Biodiversity Heritage Library." Ely Wallis. ALA Newsletter. June 2010. Online
Award. BHL members accepted the ALCTS award for outstanding collaboration at the 2010 ALA Annual Meeting in Washington, DC on June 27, 2010. Details
Presentations. "An Overview of BHL" a series of presentations during the American Library Association Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, June 28, 2010.
- Jane Smith, Head of Library Collections and Services Library and Information Services, Natural History Museum, London, United Kingdom.
- Connie Rinaldo, Ernst Mayr Library, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA and Bianca Marie Lipscomb Crowley, Collections Coordinator, Biodiversity Heritage Library/Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Washington, DC.
- Matthew Person, Technical Services Coordinator, MBLWHOI Library, Woods Hole, MA and Suzanne C. Pilsk, Metadata Librarian, Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Washington, DC Online
- Grace Costantino, Biodiversity Heritage Library Staff, Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Washington DC;
- Chris Freeland, Director, Center for Biodiversity Informatics Missouri Botanical Garden and Technical Director, Biodiversity Heritage Library, St. Louis, MO. Online
- Tom Garnett, BHL Project Director, Washington, DC.
- [PLEASE LINK YOUR PRESENTATIONS]. Photos .

July

Scanning. July 17, 2010. Smithsonian Libraries hires Stefaan Hurts as scanning technician for new digitization lab.
Publicity. July 31, 2010. Europeana ThoughtLab post in GRIB and Scanning list.

August

Scanning. August 4, 2010. Internet Archive sets up a Scribe scanning machine at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. Photos.

September

Meeting. 7-10 September 2010. Tom Garnett attends XXXX meeting in Beijing, China.
Meeting. 22-24 September 2010. Global BHL Meeting in Woods Hole
- Martin R. Kalfatovic. Taking Measure of the Biodiversity Heritage Library: 2003-2010. Martin R. Kalfatovic. Global Biodiversity Heritage Library Meeting. 22 September 2010. Woods Hole, MA. Presentation. Video

October

Meeting. 11-14 October 2010. Judy Warnement presents paper at the BGCI China and The International Symposium of Shanghai Chenshan Botanical Garden. at Shanghai Chenshan Botanical Garden / Shanghai Chenshan Plant Science Research Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China.

November

Award. 9 November 2010. Announcment that BHL was awarded the John Thackray Medal by the Society for the History of Natural History. Award to be presented in 2011. More info.
Meeting. 15-17 November 2010. Chris Freeland, Martin Kalfatovic, Keri Thompson visit the Institute of Botany/Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing) for technical and scanning workflow issues. More info.
Metadata. 23 November 2010. The Biodiversity Heritage Library adds 14,000 records to WorldCat. See OCLC Press Release

December

Global BHL. 1 December 2010. BHL SCIElo launches in Sao Paulo.