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The Biodiversity Information Standards group, also known as TDWG, holds an annual conference every year in a different city around the globe. This year it was held in Florence Italy from October 28th 2013-November 1st 2013. It was my first opportunity to attend the TDWG conference. The conference theme was “virtual communities for biodiversity science” which spoke to me of the increasing opportunities in sharing and connecting biodiversity data via the semantic web environment. I particularly enjoyed the keynote talk by Eric Meyer of the Oxford Internet Institute where researchers study the social implications of the Internet from different domain perspectives.

We’re pleased to announce that the Biodiversity Heritage Library is profiled in Searching for Sustainability: Strategies from Eight Digitized Special Collections, a major study funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services and conducted by Ithaka S+R in partnership with the Association of Research Libraries.

Six members of the Global BHL community participated in the symposium, “Crafting the Future of a Global Biodiversity Heritage Library for Diverse Communities’ Needs” at the 2013 TDWG Conference in Florence, Italy. The symposium took place on 30 October 2013 and was attended by over 50 TDWG participants. A key portion of the symposium was the closing talk by Connie Rinaldo (Harvard/Museum of Comparative Zoology) which called for feedback on the BHL from the TDWG community.

The TDWG 2013 Annual Conference has kicked off in Florence, Italy and will run through November 1, 2013.

BHL recently participated in the 8th Meeting of European Bird Curators, held in Prague, October 3-5, 2013. Alison Harding, of the Natural History Museum in London, delivered a presentation entitled “BHL: The Vast Library of Life.”  The presentation provided an overview of the Biodiversity Heritage Library and showcased the tools and resources which BHL offers as a free, open access project. Many attendees were already familiar with BHL and were very complimentary about the ongoing progress of the BHL consortium.

We’re very excited to share that yesterday, October 9, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) launched their new web portal as part of the 20th meeting of the GBIF Governing Board.  The new portal provides greatly enhanced access to the world’s largest database of documented evidence for the distribution of species across the planet. The scientific meeting was held in Berlin and webcast for the press and public. Tim Hirsch, Senior Program Officer for Engagement, and Tim Robertson, Information Systems Architect, introduced and demonstrated some of the new features now available.

We invite participants for an event that will pioneer the mining of the Encyclopedia of Life (http://eol.org) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org) to address outstanding and novel questions about the ecology and evolution of biodiversity. We aim to identify questions and data for which biologists may lack informatics skills and resources to address or analyze successfully; and symmetrically, to guide informaticians to pressing ecological and evolutionary questions.