In April 2006, I attended the Refactoring Natural History Literature meeting organized by Bryan Heidorn (then at the UIUC iSchool and also one of the early planners in BHL -- see the 2005 London meeting). Dr. Heidorn brought together a number of people for a meeting/workshop at the iSchool. Among those attending were Neil Sarkar (then at the Marine Biological Lab and one of the people behind the early taxonomic name-finding algorithm later used in BHL) and Anna Weitzman (Smithsonian informatician and botanist).
I gave the following presentation, which just might be the very first public BHL presentation:
- Kalfatovic, M. (2006, April 17). Open Access to Legacy Taxonomic Literature: The Biodiversity Heritage Library. Refactoring Natural History Literature Meeting, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19766400.
The presentation is notable for a number of things (and I might add I was merely distilling and listing things that had been discussed by many others over the past year or so):
- A list of the earliest BHL participating institutions;
- Tagging the Internet Archive as an "Affiliated Partner";
- Early mention of the "BHL Taxonomic Intelligence Tool" developed by David Remsen and staff (specifically Patrick Leary) at the MBLWHOI Library;
- Use of the tagline "Open Access to Legacy Taxonomic Literature"; this would be replace shortly by "A cornerstone of the Encyclopedia of Life" when that relationship was formalized in late 2006, early 2007;
- An enumeration and distillation of many of the early ideas about BHL:
- importance of library collections to taxonomy;
- the half-life concept of taxonomic literature (I ascribe this to Tom Garnett);
- commitment to addressing the "taxonomic impediment";
- addressing challenges of the Darwin Declaration (1998);
- and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD);
- the importance of repatriating biodiversity literature to Global South (and biodiverse rich regions);
- The presentation also has a lot of diagrams and workflows, sorry that the arrows seem to have not stayed connected in migration of formats;
- Use of the "Cabinet of Curiosity" illustrations.
And an early use of the first BHL logo (designed by Nicole Van Doren) and BHL website (first hosted by the Smithsonian at "bhl.si.edu").
Two quotes that would be re-used by me many times over the years also appear in the presentation:
- In any well-appointed Natural History Library there should be found every book and every edition of every book dealing in the remotest way with the subjects concerned. One never knows wherein one edition differs from or supplements the other and unless these are on the same table at the same time it is not possible to collate them properly. Moreover for accurate work it is necessary for the student to verify every reference he may find; it is not enough to copy from a previous author; he must verify each reference itself from the original. -- Charles Davies Sherborn, Epilogue to Index Animalium, March 1922
- Yet another physical difficulty is the task of assembling the library and indexes which will enable the student to work under proper conditions…. the beginner must now be prepared to spend liberally, or else must establish himself in an institution where a large library exists; if he work by himself with only a few books, he will have to confine himself to a very narrow specialty indeed. -- 'The Limitations of Taxonomy' by J.M. Aldrich, Science, April 22, 1927, vol. LXV, no. 1686, p.381
This was also my very first visit to UIUC. For BHL and other information science meetings, I'd visit many more times over the years. And, of course, UIUC later joined BHL as a full member under Kelli Trei.
