QUARTERLY NEWSLETTER | FALL 2016

New partners, new products, and a Halloween celebration! See what's new at BHL!

Inspiring Discovery through Free Access to Biodiversity Knowledge.

The  Biodiversity Heritage Library   (BHL) improves research methodology by collaboratively making biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community.

Page Frights! Halloween, Library & Archives Style

Page Frights Campaign Graphic
This October, BHL co-produced Page Frights, a month-long international social media celebration of Halloween, library and archives style. 

From 1-31 October, libraries and archives around the world shared Halloween-related books and images from their collections on social media using the hashtag #PageFrights. The campaign also included free pumpkin carving patterns and, through a partnership with DPLA's GIF IT UP challenge, animated GIFs that brought life to many Page Frights images. 

The campaign was a great success, with over 90 institutions worldwide participating in the eventOn Twitter, Page Frights posts reached over 3.4 million accounts, with over 16.8 million impressions . On Instagram, the hashtag reached over 1 million accounts , with over 3.3 million impressions . Learn more about the campaign and explore the content.

Page Frights Pumpkin Patterns

New Affiliates
BCU Lausanne and The Arboretum Library at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden logos
BHL is pleased to welcome two new Affiliates: Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire - Lausanne and The Arboretum Library at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden . The BHL consortium now consists of 16 Members and 16 Affiliates.

Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire - Lausanne is one of the largest public and university libraries in Switzerland. Through participation in BHL, BCU Lausanne will build upon its current digitization efforts and leverage its existing partnerships within the regional library network in order to facilitate the inclusion of library collections from other institutions within Switzerland. 

The Arboretum Library at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden holds an extensive collection of books, magazines, government documents, pamphlets, and audio-visual materials covering a wide range of topics, including gardening and garden design, plant lore, medical botany, botanical art, ethnobotany, California native plant life, and Mediterranean-climate botany. Through participation in BHL, the Arboretum Library will both expand the breadth of BHL's collection in these subject areas and provide open access to the Arboretum's publications dating back to the 1950s.

BHL Recognized for Award at the DLF Forum

During an award ceremony at the Digital Library Federation (DLF) Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on 7 November, the Biodiversity Heritage Library was recognized as a co-recipient of the inaugural DLF Community/Capacity award, along with the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.  The Community/Capacity Award honors cross-institutional collaboration and constructive, community-minded capacity building in digital libraries, archives, and museums. Learn more.

BHL Program Director Martin R. Kalfatovic accepting the Community Capacity Award on behalf of the BHL consortium.
BHL Program Director Martin R. Kalfatovic accepting the Community Capacity Award on behalf of the BHL consortium. Photo Credit @tltroup.

The Holidays Are Coming! Need Some Gift Ideas?

It's already November, and that means the holidays will soon be upon us. Thanks to BHL, you can find those special gifts for the people on your shopping list and help support biodiversity research at the same time!

The BHL CafePress store has hundreds of products featuring amazing images from our library. 100% of the proceeds from the store are used to digitize more books for BHL. How does this help support biodiversity research? Click here to find out.


Greeting card and notebook from Seguy_s _Papillons__ available in the BHL store.
Greeting card and notebook from Seguy's 'Papillons' available in the BHL store. Shop products with this image today!

BHL Product Development & Marketing Intern

In October, BHL  w elcomed Carolina Murcia as the new BHL Product Development and Marketing Intern. Ove r her eight-month internship through the Smithsonian Libraries in Washington, D.C., Carolina  will conduct market research and create products and marketing materials for the BHL CafePress store . Explore some of the amazing dragon products that Carolina has already creat ed and learn more about her on our blog .

Carolina Murcia_ BHL_s new Product Development and Marketing Intern
Carolina Murcia and some of the amazing dragon products she's created for the BHL CafePress store.

Food Security, Scientific Collections, & BHL

On 19-21 September 2016, BHL participated in the Scientific Collections International Food Security Symposium at the National Agricultural Library in Beltsville, MD. The workshop was designed to help show the importance of scientific collections to the topic of food security. 

Grace Costantino, BHL Outreach and Communication Manager, presented on the ways in which BHL's collections can support food security research. Martin R. Kalfatovic, BHL Program Director, chaired the session "Varieties of Food." This session featured a talk from Dr. Rod Page (University of Glasgow) entitled "Unknown Knowns, Long Tails, and Long Data," which discussed data mining techniques to extract relevant information from scientific literature. Learn more.

Martin R. Kalfatovic chairing the session "Varieties of Food" at the SciColl Food Security Symposium.

Rod Page Talks Bioinformatics, Linked Data, & Primary Literature at the Smithsonian

On 22 September, Dr. Rod Page, Professor at the University of Glasgow and creator of BioStor, gave a presentation at the  Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History Library  about ideas for extracting and linking data across biodiversity repositories and primary literature.

The talk, entitled " The Sam Adams Talk ," covered topics including phylogenetics, geophylogeny visualizations, linking article and specimen data across repositories, annotations, the biodiversity knowledge graph, and data as source code. View the talk on YouTube.

"The Sam Adams Talk" by Dr. Rod Page


Presentations about BHL!

Explore some of the presentations that staff have given about BHL over the past few months.

  • Grace Costantino.  Literature Resources to Support Food Security Research: An Introduction to the BHLScientific Collections International Food Security Symposium. September 2016.
  • Lisa Cardy and Alison Harding. Unlocking Biodiversity Data @ the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL): the Natural History Museum Perspective. The Linnean Society of London: What Should Be in Your Digital Toolbox? October 2016.

Get Involved with BHL!

There are many ways to get involved in BHL, from becoming a Member or  Affiliate and contributing content to donating to support BHL or  participating in one of our many citizen science activities.  Currently, BHL's volunteer opportunities include  Flickr image tagging , transcribing field books as part of  The Field Book Project , correcting OCR via our two crowdsourcing games , or describing illustrations via Science Gossip on Zooniverse Learn more about how you can get involved today!

Support BHL

Providing researchers with free access to biodiversity knowledge is critical to saving life on Earth. Help us accomplish this goal by donating to BHL today!

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