Meeting: 2014 BHL Technical Meeting (2-3 April 2014, St. Louis)

The 2014 Spring CNI meeting was being held in St. Louis and it seemed like a good opportunity to save on travel expenses and add on a BHL. 

We scheduled the BHL meeting for 2-3 April, right after CNI. BHL gathered the staff involved in technical development at the Missouri Botanical Garden. It was a useful meeting to cover key topics during the ongoing technical transition of BHL.

We stayed, as was often the case, at Trelease House, the apartment building the Missouri Botanical Garden provides for academic and research visitors. On the night of April 3, I woke up at 05:30 to my phone making emergency alert sound. 

Tornado warning in area with one spotted nearby (near the Ritz Carlton where CNI was in fact). Get up and out to main room. My suitemates were unaware of alert, so I got everyone up and we all go to shelter just as sirens go off outside and loudspeakers shout "take shelter immediately". Can't get to basement from front of building, so we go under stairs. I get messages from other BHL staff in other rooms that they're all sheltering. 

Group photo with World's Fair Donuts

Later that day, when we go to dinner in a downtown restaurant, there is another tornado warning and we all have to head to the basement of the restaurant for about 20 minutes.

 

Doug Holland (right) giving a tour of the Rare Book Collection (with Kia Siang Hock from the National Library Board, Singapore)

When there wasn't a threat of tornados, the Missouri Botanical Garden was looking great as springtime was underway.

Views of the Missouri Botanical Garden

Meeting: 2009 Architecture Meeting (9-10 March 2009, Woods Hole)

Group Photo from 9-10 March 2009 BHL Architecture Meeting (Woods Hole)

In March 2009, BHL held an architecture meeting in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Woods Hole is home to many major scientific organizations including the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI), NOAA Fisheries Woods Hole Laboratory , and the U.S. Coast Guard Sector Southeastern New England. The early years of BHL saw many meetings in the Woods Hole facilities.

Tom Garnett (BHL Program Director), Bianca Crowley (BHL Collections Manager), and Chris Freeland (BHL Technical Director from the Missouri Botanical Garden, MOBOT) led the meeting. Chris was joined by other tech staff from MOBOT, including Mike Lichtenberg (who went on to be the key developer of BHL), Phil Cryer, Chris Meyers. Other staff attending from across BHL were:

• Natural History Museum, London (Adrian Smales, Bernard Scaife)
• Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard (Connie Rinaldo, Joe deVeer)
• The New York Botanical Garden (John Mignault), 
• Smithsonian Libraries (Suzanne Pilsk, Martin Kalfatovic), 
• MBLWHOI Library (John Furfey, Ahmed Hamed, Maggie Rioux, Diane Rielinger, Anthony Goddard)
• Encyclopedia of Life/MBL (David Patterson, Patrick Leary)
• BHL Europe/Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin (Henning Scholz)

The combined library of WHOI and MBL, the MBLWHOI Library, was a founding member of BHL and an important node for bioinformatics. The MBLWHOI Library was led by Cathy Norton (also in attendance) who was the BHL Executive Committee Vice-Chair.

The meeting was also significant in that this was perhaps the first BHL meeting attended by a representative of the recently formed BHL Europe (Henning Scholtz).

Other key topics included:

• BHL Article Repository (later to become CiteBank). Presentation by Phil Cryer
• The "Orange Bag" problem (named after an orange bag sent to Chris Freeland with content to upload to BHL) -- original photo here
• A presentation by Chris Freeland on the "BHL Flipbook"
• The team from EOL/MBL also gave a presentation on taxonomic name finding, something that would become a cornerstone of BHL's success

Papers and Laptops

Swope Academic Housing

Tom Garnett, Henning Scholtz, John Furfey