VALA Conference

BHL Symposium at the VALA Conference

Date: 5 February 2014

Time: 1345 - 1525

Title

Scanning Locally, Collaborating Globally: Creating a Global Biodiversity Heritage Library

Abstract

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 117,000 volumes. Including both pre-Linnean (> 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.

Conference Program

Confirmed Presenters

• Martin Kalfatovic. TITLE. Short overview of BHL formation and introduction of the Global Nodes
• Ely Wallis
• Anne-Lise Fourie
• Jiri Frank
• Nancy Gwinn (Focus on governance and roughly similar to talk in Morocco)

Notes from Ely/Martin on how to structure the presentations: The overall theme of the panel is similar to ICADLA last year - how to run a multinational, regionally distributed digital library program. My suggestion would be for you to focus on your node and give essentially the same talk as you did in Morocco.