Meeting: 2015 CNI Spring Membership Meeting (13-14 April 2015, Seattle, WA)

The 2015 CNI Spring Membership Meeting took place 13-14 April 2015 in Seattle, Washington. It was a busy meeting for me as I had two presentations. One, obviously, on BHL (along with Smithsonian Libraries' Director and BHL Chair, Nancy E. Gwinn) and another on the scholarly communications program at Smithsonian Libraries (see below).

Brewster Kahle delivered the opening plenary, "Providing Universal Access to Modern Materials—and Living to Tell the Tale."

Brewster Kahle

Nancy E. Gwinn

• Kalfatovic, M., & Gwinn, N. E. (2015, April 14). Building a Vast Library of Life: The Biodiversity Heritage Library Looks to the Future. CNI Spring 2015 Membership Meeting (CNI), Seattle, WA. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19741065. (abstract)

As a bonus, I gave a second presentation at the meeting that year (that wasn't about BHL):

• Kalfatovic, M. (2015, April 13). For the Increase and Diffusion of Knowledge: The Smithsonian's Research Online (SRO), Supporting Smithsonian Institution's Plan to Provide Increased Public Access to Federally Funded Publications and Digital Research Materials. CNI Spring 2015 Membership Meeting (CNI), Seattle, WA. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19741382. 

Abstract: Smithsonian Research Online (SRO) is a key tool in the Smithsonian's goal to implement the White House's "Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research" mandate. A pan-Smithsonian team developed the Smithsonian Institution plan and draft Implementation Manual that will meet the requirement laid out in by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The existing SRO platform (and associated digital repository) will serve as key components of the Smithsonian's plan which will also user additional tools and resources being developed by the wider ARL and publishers' community. The Smithsonian OSTP Plan was a cooperative response developed by Smithsonian Libraries, Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, Smithsonian researchers, the Office of General Counsel, and the Office of the Chief Information Officer, under the guidance of the Smithsonian's Deputy Under Secretary for Collections and Interdisciplinary Support. This session will outline the interactions of the various portions of the draft plan and its manifestation in a non-university environment.

See also "Sleepless in Seattle - CNI’s Spring Conference 2015" (April 29, 2015) by Keith Webster

Meeting: Refactoring Natural History Literature (17-18 April 2006, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

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.

 

 

Presentation: Open Access to Legacy Taxonomic Literature: The Biodiversity Heritage Library (25 April 2006) at National Science Visiting Committee: National Science Digital Library (Arlington, VA)

On 25 April 2006, Tom Garnett and I met with the National Science Visiting Committee: National Science Digital Library (Arlington, VA) for a presentation on BHL.

• Open Access to Legacy Taxonomic Literature: The Biodiversity Heritage Library by Martin R. Kalfatovic and Tom Garnett, Smithsonian Institution Libraries. National Science Visiting Committee: National Science Digital Library | National Science Foundation, Arlington. April 25, 2006.

open-access-to-legacy-biodiversity-literaturefrom tgarnett

Meetings: DPLA West and other meetings | CAS / CDL / Apple (April 2012, San Francisco & Oakland)

22-28 April 2012 was a busy week in the Bay Area with Chris Freeland (BHL Technical Director). The main purpose of the trip was to attend the DPLA West meeting held at the Internet Archive:

• On April 26, 2012, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, in conjunction with the San Francisco Public Library and the Internet Archive, convened a series of meetings of the six DPLA workstreams at the San Francisco Public Library to discuss key issues pertaining to the DPLA and its core objectives. The goal of these meetings was to chart out agenda items for the next six months of work, as well as to provide a forum for workstreams to share updates and ideas with one another. -- DPLA West Workstream Meetings Press Release (26 April 2012)

While in the Bay Area, we also paid a visit to our BHL colleagues at the California Academy of Sciences (CAS). We also headed down to Cupertino to visit with the Apple iTunes U team. iTunes U had worked with BHL to create a series free BHL-centric resources for users of iTunes. While at Apple HQ (on Infinite Loop), I bought my first iPad at the Apple staff store.

Wikimedia (and the entire Wiki community) was a long time proponent of BHL. We were able to schedule some time with senior Wikimedia staff at their San Francisco headquarters to discuss common goals and projects.

A key portion of the Bay Area visit was a stop on the East Bay where Chris and I took the BART across the Bay to Oakland for meetings and presentations for the staff of the California Digital Library (CDL). At the time, BHL had been working with CDL (as they had content in the Internet Archive harvested by BHL). A few years earlier, in June 2009, BHL signed agreement for CDL content and at the time, CDL was the 3rd largest provider of items after Smithsonian and MBLWHOI Library (9,796 titles).

  

Here's my presentation for the meeting.

• Kalfatovic, M. (2012, April 24). The Biodiversity Heritage Library: A Vast Library of Life. Information Meeting: California Digital Library (CDL), Oakland, CA. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19710064.

As a bonus, Chris and I headed over to Berkeley after the meeting and went to Chez Panisse for dinner.

Presentation: 2 presentations for the 2016 BHL Annual Meeting and 7th Global BHL Meeting (11-15 April 2016, London)

The 2016 BHL Annual meeting marked the 10th anniversary (by some counts) of BHL. I'll reflect more on that meeting in a future post, but for now, here are the two presentations that I did, one for the BHL Day event and the Program Director's Update.

• Kalfatovic, M. (2016, April 12). The Biodiversity Heritage Library: 10+1 and Beyond: Looking Forward. 2016 BHL Annual Meeting and 7th Global BHL Meeting, London, United Kingdom (Natural History Museum). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19545214.
• Kalfatovic, M. (2016, April 13). 2016 BHL Program Director's Report. 2016 BHL Annual Meeting and 7th Global BHL Meeting, London, United Kingdom (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19545342.

Meeting: Information Futures Institute (12 April 2008, Berkman Center, Harvard University)

Berkman Center

The Information Futures Institute (IFI) was (is?) an informal, recurring group, workshop, or collaborative initiative focused on the future of libraries, information science, and technology. I was introduced to the group by Cathy Norton (MBLWHOI Library) and Cathy invited me to a meeting of the group held at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

I got to meet a bunch of very interesting people at the session, including a number of Berkman people. Those attending included David Lankes (library thinker), Lewis Hyde (author of The Gift) and the brilliant, funny and always entertaining David Weinberger. David and I would go on to move in similar circles around projects like the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

Never heard about the group after my attending this meeting and not sure what became of it.

• Kalfatovic, M. (2008, April 12). "Oh Time, Thy Pyramids!" The Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Unchaining of the Universal Library(?)‏. Information Futures Institute Meeting (IFI), Cambridge, MA (Berkman Center, Harvard University). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19539675

Meeting: EOD - eBooks on Demand (10-11 April 2014, Innsbruck, Austria)

The Books2ebooks (EOD - eBooks on Demand) network held an international conference focused on the use and re-use of digital content on 11 April 2014 in Innsbruck, Austria. The project focused on digitizing and increasing the visibility of public domain library books from libraries across Europe.

The meeting opened with a reception on the evening of 10 April in the library spaces.

I was invited to the meeting as the keynote speaker and asked to talk about BHL.

• Kalfatovic, M. (2014, April 11). Building for Demand: The Growth of the Biodiversity Heritage Library. 2014 EOD - eBooks on Demand Network Meeting, Innsbruk, Austria. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19514954

I really liked giving this talk and was able to use a number of various themes I'd developed over the years, Plato, Borges, etc. and got to do it high in the Austrian Alps in the beautiful spaces of the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Tirol. 

Quote from Phadrus: “You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.” (Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Fowler, 1925. 275a)

Meeting: I Annotate: Annoto Ergo Sum (10-12 April 2013, San Francisco)

I've attended a few of the I Annotate conferences, this, I Annotate: Annoto Ergo Sum (11-12 April 2013) was the first. Organized by Hypothes.is (and it's founder Dan Whaley), I Annotate always drew a crowd of the most interesting people. The meeting was held in the conference facilities of Fort Mason Center (San Francisco). One of the problems with Fort Mason is it looks right out over the Golden Gate, so can be distracting at times. 

Before the meeting, I took the opportunity for a visit to the California Academy of Sciences (a BHL partner) and met with the library staff. Also on this trip was Suzanne Pilsk (Smithsonian) and Chris Freeland (Missouri Botanical Garden). Cal Academy is a great place. I used to go there as a child (to the old dark and dusty building, so the new shiny museum with the eco-garden roof is always a surprise) and loved the coelacanth, the "living fossil," and a type of lobe-finned fish once thought extinct, that has, over the years, competed with the dodo for my attention.

Dan Whaley

A world of visitors

BHL

I Annotate Meeting

The first day kicked off with a series of talks. The keynote was by Caterina Fake (then of Findery, previously a founder of Flickr). Other talks included "Shared Canvas: Digital Facsimiles via Distributed Annotation" by Rob Sanderson (then at Los Alamos National Lab) who I crossed paths with for many years and is now a IIIF Editor.

For lunch, it was a taco truck parked out front (not sure if this was my first time of this very San Francisco treat).

JPB

On day two, the keynote way by John Perry Barlow (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and lyricist for the Grateful Dead. JPB and I crossed paths many times over the years. Usually in San Francisco, but the first time was at a meeting in Washington, DC in around 1996 or so where we both arrived late and ended up sitting next to each other in the back of the room (before he went up to give a keynote).

One of the talks on day two was “Rap Genius” by Jeremy Dean (Rap Genius). Rap Genius, a lyrics annotator, later morphed into just plain Genius and then over the years became so overrun with intrusive ads that its become almost unusable.

John Kunze (then of California Digital Library) gave a talk “Annotating Research Datasets” and “Enabling the distributed curation of the Astronomical literature through annotations” was given by Alberto Accomazzi (Smithsonian/NASA ADS).

Next up was yours truly doing the presentation:

• Kalfatovic, M. (2013, April 11). Building on Linnaeus: 260 Years of Taxonomic Annotation. I Annotate: Annoto Ergo Sum, San Francisco. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19503148

Because this was San Francisco, another of the attendees was Ted Nelson (of Project Xanadu fame) who just happened to be there. 

Ted Nelson

Meeting: 2022 WeDigBio Symposium: "The Critical Roles of Libraries in Understanding Earth's Biota" (8 April 2022 - Virtual)

WeDigBio is a project of the larger iDigBio project funded by the National Science Foundation. Both "DigBio" projects run regular events and trainings. In 2022, I participated in the virtual symposium, The Role of Libraries in Understanding Earth’s Biota where I gave a presentation on BHL.

The WeDigBio Symposium entitled “The Role of Libraries in Understanding Earth’s Biota.” This symposium will be from 3–5 pm ET, Friday, April 8, and it is scheduled to include talks by Darlene Cavalier (Professor of Practice, School for the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University), Martin Kalfatovic (Associate Director, Smithsonian Libraries), and others with valuable perspectives. -- iDigBio Website

• Kalfatovic, M. (2022, April 8). Biodiversity Literature in Support of Citizen Science: An Introduction to the Biodiversity Heritage Library. WeDigBio Symposium: The Role of Libraries in Understanding the Earth's Biota, Virtual. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19477174

• A recording for the April WeDigBio 2022 symposium "The Critical Roles of Libraries in Understanding Earth's Biota" can be found at Vimeo. 

Two biodiversity/bioinformatics meetings in Belgium and the Netherlands (2-4 April 2015)

As Program Director for the Biodiversity Heritage Library, I participated in many meetings around bioinformatics. In April 2015, two important meetings were held in Oostende (Belgium) and Leiden (Netherlands).

The first of the two meetings took place in Oostende. The meeting was the Catalogue of Life Mini-Symposium held at the Vlaams Instituut Voor de Zee (VLIZ). In addition to staff from the Catalogue of Life, Donald Hobern (GBIF), David Remsen (Marine Biological Lab), and Tom Orrell (Smithsonian/ITIS) were attending. 

At the Symposium, I gave the following presentation:

Kalfatovic, M. (2015, April 2). Looking Forward: The Biodiversity Heritage Library. Catalogue of Life Mini-Symposium (CoL), Oostende (Belgium). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19393206

The weather in Oostende was challenging, high winds and rain; we also had to take a short ferry ride to the meeting space. All the things that make biodiversity meetings special.

Following the meeting in Oostende, many of the group moved on to Leiden for a focused meeting on the work of BHL, EOL, ITIS, and GBIF. In addition to those at the CoL meeting, Bob Corrigan (EOL), Peter Schalk (CoL/GBIF) were in attendance. The meetings were held in the offices of Naturalis, then still in their temporary quarters in the Pesthuis before moving to their new building.

Group photos are always a great part of the meeting, here, we posed as Dutch Masters:

I was also able to take a bit of personal time and visited Amsterdam, Ghent, and the fabulous tulip gardens of Keukenhof.