Apologies for duplication – Please redistribute to anyone you think might be
interested.  Thanks! Life and Literature Biodiversity Heritage Library Hosts
Conference on Digitization

The Biodiversity Heritage Library will host a two-day conference titled “*Life
and Literature” Nov. 14 and 15 at the Field Museum in Chicago*. The
conference will unite librarians, biologists, computer scientists,
publishers and students to set the agenda for biodiversity literature
digitizing and its networked environment for the next five years.

“Life and Literature” seeks to engage current and future constituencies
concerned with biodiversity literature. Sessions will discuss the
interoperability of major biodiversity and digital library programs,
continued integration of digitized literature within biodiversity databases
and publishing models for legacy scientific literature.

Guest lecturers include *Richard Pyle and George Dyson*. Pyle, a zoologist
at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, is an expert of the taxonomy and
biogeography of coral-reef fishes. He has written more than 100 scientific
articles and has been featured in several documentary films. Dyson is a
scientific historian of technology whose interests include the development
of the Aleut kayak (*Baidarka, 1986*), the evolution of digital computing
and telecommunications (*Darwin Among the Machines, 1997*) and the
exploration of space (*Project Orion, 2002*).

Headquartered at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, the Biodiversity
Heritage Library is the literature digitization component of the
Encyclopedia of Life, a global effort to document all 1.8 million named
species of animals, plants and other forms of life on Earth. BHL is a
consortium of 12 major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries
and research institutions. Its goal is to contribute to the global
“biodiversity commons” by digitizing and aggregating the resources housed
within each of the participating institutions, providing free and open
access to the legacy literature that underpins the work of the natural
science community.

For more information about the conference, visit
http://www.lifeandliterature.org. To further explore the BHL, visit
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org.