BHL Workshops for Collaborating Across a Global Consortium

As an international consortium, the Biodiversity Heritage Library brings together the taxonomic literature in collections of libraries throughout the world and makes them available for free and open access.  But how do we coordinate scanning and associated processes across so many institutions of diverse sizes, cultures and capacities? Built around widely adopted library standards, BHL prescribes metadata and scanning specifications for contributing libraries.  Yet even with standards and guidelines, variations in interpretation of standards along with locally implemented practices can benefit from well-defined workflows and toolsuites. BHL works with our global partners to help tailor our workflows to their local practices through workshops that cover a range of practical considerations, from broad topics like rights policies (which may vary across international boundaries, as well as between individual institutions), governance and terms of agreements, to specifications for scanning and metadata as well as detailed workflows for pagination, QA, and upload. In this presentation, I will introduce the need for organized training events for collaborating globally, an overview of the kinds of topics covered including rights and permissions, scanning, and ingest workflows, and examples of successes and lessons learned from the BHL Africa Workshop which will be held the week before as part of TDWG’s pre-conference.  Funded by the JRS Biodiversity Foundation, this workshop will provide an opportunity for 15-20 staff from BHL Africa to build capacity for digitizing open access biodiversity literature through training, partnership building, and the creation of workplans for participating institutions.