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

24,000th iNaturalist Observation: Atalantycha bilineata (Two-lined Leatherwing)

On 9 April 2026 I made my 24,000th iNaturalist observation (at left). The observation was of Atalantycha bilineata (Two-lined Leatherwing) spotted on a walk through Hillside Park (in Arlington, VA). I ended up observing three individuals (see all my observations of Atalantycha bilineata here).

Atalantycha bilineata was originally described by American entomologist Thomas Say in 1823 under the binomial name Cantharis bilineata in the Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (volume 3, page 182):

6. C. bilineatus. Rufous; elytra black; thorax with two black lines. Inhabits the United States.

The eagle-eyed will note that Say indicates the species as C. bilineatus, not C. bilineata. Why you ask, well, the discrepancy arises from the gender of the species name, which must agree with the genus name Cantharis (feminine). While it was sometimes historically listed with the masculine suffix -us, the correct scientific name based on ICZN rules is Cantharis bilineata.

At right: Say, T. (1823). Cantharis bilineata. In Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (Vol. 3, p. 182). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19498272

The species had kept the Cantharis bilineata name until 2005 when Sergey Kazantsev's review of the genus established the new Nearctic genus Atalantycha to accommodate certain species, including A. bilineata as a new combination.

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. 

Meeting: 2025 GBIF Midterm Meeting (8-9 April 2025, Copenhagen)

I traveled to Copenhagen in early April for the 2025 GBIF Midterm meeting. This was my 2nd GBIF Midterm (see links below to my 1st and 3rd). This gathering brings together the GBIF Executive Committee, Science Committee, Nodes Steering Group, and, for me, the GBIF Budget Committee (where I served at the time as 2nd Vice Chair). 

Members of the GBIF Secretariat also attend portions of the meeting and it provides a good look into the plans for the coming year that will be further explored during the GBIF Governing Board meeting held later in the year, in Bogota (in October)

I also had a chance to visit the Botanical Garden during the trip.

See also the following posts:

• Meeting: 2024 GBIF Midterm Meeting (18-19 March 2024, Copenhagen)
• Meeting: 2026 GBIF Midterm Meeting (24-25 March 2026, Copenhagen)