How Did We Get Here from There? The Origin Story of The Biodiversity Heritage Library. Martin R. Kalfatovic. 2017 Library Leaders Forum. Internet Archive. San Francisco. 13 October 2017.

1. Martin R. Kalfatovic
Twitter@BHLProgDirector
Program Director
Biodiversity Heritage Library
Smithsonian Libraries
How Did We Get Here from There?
The Origin Story of The Biodiversity Heritage Library
Library Leaders Forum 2017
11-13 October 2017| San Francisco

2. Natural History, circa1599

3. Inspiring Discovery through Free Access
to Biodiversity Knowledge
Over 10 years of inspiring discovery
15th-21st centuries
through
free & open access
to biodiversity literature & archives
from the
Mission
The Biodiversity Heritage Library improves research
methodology by collaboratively making biodiversity
literature openly available to the world as part of a
global biodiversity community.

5. “BHL is fantastic! It has made a huge
difference in my work - sometimes
providing access to texts I wouldn’t
otherwise be able to get, sometimes by
giving me the gift of my own time...”
Dr. Leigh Anne Riedman
NASAAstrobiology PostdoctoralFellow
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Harvard University

11. 1 Internet Archive Hero Award

13. The BHL Origin Story …
Once upon a time ...

14. Well, it wasn’t a
primordial swamp,
but at a 2004 meeting
in Telluride, high in
the Colorado Rocky
Mountains where a
number of brilliant
folk got together
including Tom
Garnett, the first BHL
Program Director and
Brewster Kahle ...

15. Tom Garnett
BHL Program Director
2006-2012
The goal is to
digitize taxonomic
texts and make
them available ...

16. …it’s very complex, we’re
developing a formula ...
* Actually, the J(x) definition of
the Explicit Formula for the
Prime Counting Function
*

17. Dudes, why don’t
you just scan it
all?
Me and Brewster at the
De Lange Conference VI
Rice University, 2007

18. Just scan it all? You
gotta be kidding,
that’s gotta be a
Rocky Mountain
High!

19. But we got busy … and got around the world ...

20. And we did scan it all … well not all …
yet...

21. “The cultivation of natural
history cannot be efficiently
carried out without reference to
an extensive library.”
Charles Darwin, et al (1847)

22. We now live in what is being called the Anthropocene,
a time that is perhaps seeing the Earth’s Sixth Great
Extinction ...
The "normal" rate of extinction is one species every four
years. Today, species are going extinct at a rate of FOUR
per HOUR.

26. “BHL provides access to literature that would
otherwise be impossible to find or even know
that it existed. It is important to have access to a
biodiversity library that has done so well to
document the past, as this is vital to our
understanding of the future.”
Dean Janiak
Biologist
Smithsonian Marine Station at Fort Pierce

28. Thank You & Onward!
Twitter @ BHLProgDirector