Tag Archives: Biodiversity Heritage Library

Looking back at IFLA conference

Posted on by
Reply

Becky Morin (User Services Librarian, California Academy of Sciences) and I attended the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) World Library and Information Congress in Puerto Rico from August 13-16.

Ifla2L-R: Becky Morin and Bianca Crowley

Our paper, Heeding the Call: User Feedback Management and the Digital Library, written in collaboration with Smithsonian Institution Libraries colleagues Grace Costantino (Digital Collections Librarian) and Erin Thomas (Digital Collections Librarian), won the De Gruyter Saur / IFLA Research Paper Award complete with a €1,000 prize and an invitation to the IFLA President's lunch.

An annual conference attracting over 3,500 attendees from over 120 countries, and with translation services in the 7 official IFLA languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Russian and Spanish), the event feels like a library conference mixed with a UN meeting. The conference kicked off on Sunday August 14 with a warm welcome from prominent Puerto Rican professor, humanist, and historian, Dr. Fernando Picó.

Later that day Becky and I had the esteemed opportunity to accept the award on behalf of our colleagues at the IFLA President's lunch where we rubbed shoulders with some big names in the international library community, including Ellen Tise, (IFLA President), Patrice Landry (Responsable Indexation matières, Bibliothèque nationale suisse BN), Daniel J. Caron (Librarian and Archivist of Canada), our very own Nancy Gwinn, and many others.

Over the course of Monday and Tuesday, we attended a variety of conference sessions, notably sessions on: Building Stronger Library Associations, Challenges and Changing Roles of Science and Technology Libraries, and Winds of Change: a taxonomy of clouds for libraries. Not wanting to miss an opportunity to share about the Biodiversity Heritage Library while attending conference sessions, we donned giant, full-color, buttons with the phrase "Ask Me About BHL". The buttons worked out really well as a fun ice-breaker for networking with librarians from all over the world. Especially over the OCLC Reception on Monday night, Becky and I had the chance to talk up BHL with a variety of new faces in the buffet line. That evening we enjoyed our dinner and watched professional dancers showcase their Salsa and Merengue skills with Rebecca Graham (Harvard University) and the Libraries' Mary Augusta Thomas. I am already scheming about button ideas for my next conference; buttons with BHL QR codes are coming next!

Ifla1

In addition, we met with Dr. Alice Keller (Editorial Director, Library and Information Science & History, De Gruyter Saur) & Ingeborg Verheul (Communications and Services Director, IFLA) to discuss the publication of the award-winning paper. Decided just recently, the paper will be featured in an upcoming De Gruyter publication, stay tuned. My colleagues and I are honored to have our paper published and feel very privileged to have had the opportunity to work together to deliver a paper that really captures the heart of how BHL librarians work together to accomplish the day-to-day tasks that are digitizing nearly 35 million pages of biodiversity content and making it available for free online.

—Bianca Crowley, Biodiversity Heritage Library Collections Coordinator

 

Increased Access for History, Art, and Culture Digitizations — New URLS!

Posted on by
Reply
Online If you’ve seen any of the 1,000+ physical copies of the books scanned through the History, Art, and Culture (HAC) Digitization Project, maybe you noticed a sticker just below the barcode that reads ”ONLINE.”

We do that for the same reasons the Biodiversity Heritage Library puts stickers that read “BHL” on the thousands of items the Libraries has digitized for that collection: to alert staff that the book is available online, thereby increasing access while decreasing the wear and tear on the physical item.

We are now pleased to announce the presence of URLS in SIRIS with direct links to Digitized HAC volumes. The methodology varies slightly between monographs and multi-volume titles, but the end result is the same, links that take you directly to the digitized version of the item without a trip to the stacks.

—Erin Thomas

 

Spotlight on Amateur Naturalists

Posted on by
Reply

A web project by Courtney Shaw, VZ Librarian, formatted for the web by Diane Pitassy.

This website, Spotlight on Amateur Naturalists, highlights the scientific and popular literature contributions of prominent amateur naturalists from the 18th-20th centuries. The project started about four years ago when the then Zoo librarian, Alvin Hutchinson, thought that it might be nice to highlight some of the non-taxonomic books in the VZ libraries, especially those used by scientists use in the course of their work.

Konrad Gesner, Historia animalium [History of animals], 1551-87, "De Camelo."

As Courtney Shaw started investigating this idea, she asked many curators what books and people they thought should be included. It became evident that many contributions referenced by the curators were written by amateur naturalists. The decision was made to pursue the idea of how amateur naturalists have enhanced the knowledge base of vertebrate zoology literature.

The goal of the site is to give a fullness to the idea that many people, of all ages and walks of life, can actively contribute to science and inspire interest and concern for the natural world.

The site is divided into different publication categories. Many images of books were taken by the Libraries' Photo Lab and added to the Galaxy of Images; some were used in the current text. Whenever possible, works in the public domain were linked to full text online versions available on the Biodiversity Heritage Library, Archive.org, and Google Books. Hotlinks were also made to EOL pages when specific taxa were referenced in the text. The site will be included on the Vertebrate Zoology Libraries page as a featured presentation.

—Courtney Shaw

 

Spotlight: BHL

Posted on by
Reply

The 3rd Quarter Report (2011) for the Libraries’ activities in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) are now available to view online. They include BHL stats, figures, as well as social networking stats and analysis. 

Bhl_logo-final

Back issues are also available: 1st Quarter (2011) and 2nd Quarter (2011).

Thanks to the Libraries' Grace Costantino for another excellent job of editing and design.

—Martin Kalfatovic

BHL awarded John Thackray Medal by Society for the History of Natural History

Posted on by
Reply

On May 20 in London, Graham Higley accepted the 2011 John Thackray Medal of the Society for the History of Natural History on behalf of Tom Garnett, Program Director of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL).

DSCN3328

The Thackray Medal is given for "significant achievements in the history or bibliography of natural history."  Higley is the head of the library and information services of the Natural History Museum in London, one of the 12 partners of the Biodiversity Heritage Library project, which has made freely accessible to date over 91,000 volumes of biodiversity literature through the BHL Portal.

—Nancy E. Gwinn