Meeting: Catalogue of Life Global Team Meeting (19-21 March 2019, Champaign, IL, Illinois Natural History Survey)

BHL had worked with the Catalogue of Life (CoL) for a number of years and I had attended CoL meetings in various locals in the past.

This meeting was held in Champaign, IL, at the Illinois Natural History Survey (INHS). The INHS is the home base for the Global Names Architecture (GNA) team (since they moved from Woods Hole a while back). It was great to see Dmitry (Dima) Mozzherin and Geoffrey Ower. 

The meeting also gave me a chance to catch up with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) BHL team of Kelli Trei and Susan Braxton. 

From Left: Peter, Dima, Olaf:

Ed DeWalt (INHS) was the host of the meeting that included other key players including Peter Schalk (CoL/Naturalis), Tom Orrell (ITIS/Smithsonian), Yury Roskov (Species 2000), Markus Doering (GBIF), Leen Vandepitte (WoRMS), David Remsen (Marine Biological Lab), Olaf Bánki (CoL), Chuck Miller (Missouri Botanical Garden), and others.

It was also great to walk around the UIUC campus which I visited a number of times for both BHL and other digital library work.

I gave the following presentation on BHL to the group.

• Kalfatovic, M. (2019, March 21). BHL &The Catalogue of Life. Catalogue of Life Global Team Meeting, Champaign, IL (Illinois Natural History Survey). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19037959

Publication: "Data Born in Literature: The Biodiversity Heritage Library – A Global Digital Library Serving the Planet" (2025)

Last year, Digital Libraries Across Continents, Edited by Le Yang and Alicia Salaz was published by the Taylor & Francis Group. Included in the collection was my chapter,  "Data Born in Literature: The Biodiversity Heritage Library – A Global Digital Library Serving the Planet." 

The chapter gives an overview of the origin and growth of The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and the vision for the BHL to move from a traditional "digital library" to a 21st century repository of all heritage biodiversity literature recast and refactored as actionable data. 

The 2019 BHL Annual Meeting (Ithaca, NY) was where the idea that BHL is more than just "books" and exists as data first came about. It's hinted at in my presentation as Program Director, "Seeing a Butterfly & Knowing What It Is: BHL: Past > Present > Future" and was fleshed out in the coming years. I'll cover that in more detail in future posts.

• Citation: Kalfatovic, Martin R., "Data Born in Literature: The Biodiversity Heritage Library – A Global Digital Library Serving the Planet," in Yang, L., & Salaz, A. (Eds.). (2025). Digital Libraries Across Continents (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003473589.

More about Digital Libraries Across Continents:

Digital Libraries Across Continents illustrates how digital librarianship practitioners and scholars digitize, exhibit, and preserve their cultural heritage, and how these practices may be influenced by the policy, economic, and sociocultural environments in which they are developed.

Including scholarly articles, case studies, examples of best practice, and conceptual essays solicited from different continents, this book provides an overview of the status quo of digital libraries around the globe. The case studies examine how macro-level policy, funding, and social priorities influence the development of digital libraries. The volume offers a deeper understanding of the similarities and differences between libraries in different countries and the ways in which they view, foster, develop, and sustain digital librarianship. Chapters within the book examine systems, standards, workflows, content, protocol, social and policy environments, culture, metadata, and more, through a series of case studies provided by practitioners working in these settings. Taking a comparative international approach, the book promotes the development of inclusive, accessible, and sustainable digital libraries that serve a global human knowledge endeavor.

Digital Libraries Across Continents provides a wide-ranging examination of issues in cross-border digital library contexts. It will be essential reading for library practitioners, as well as information scientists and educators.