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GLAM
March 2026
Contents
This Month in GLAM – Volume XVI, Issue III, March 2026
Normal version
Single page version
Biodiversity Heritage Library report
Updates on work by BHL-Wiki Working Group members
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By
Ambrosia10
BHL Field Museum to host BHL Technical Infrastructure
The Field Museum looking north across Chicago
The BHL-Wiki community are celebrating the news that the
Field Museum
has agreed to host the BHL Technical Infrastructure. More information on this transition away from the
Smithsonian Institution
can be found in this
BHL blog
. Many BHL-Wiki working group members were equal parts delighted and relieved to receive this news.
Vanderbilt University’s Heard Libraries Joins BHL
More positive news has also been announced with this
BHL blog
proclaiming
Vanderbilt University’s Heard Libraries
is joining BHL and will be contributing cloud infrastructure expertise and technical leadership for BHL.
BHL Annual Meeting 2026
Siobhan Leachman (
Ambrosia10
) will be attending the BHL Annual Meeting in London. She was asked to prepare a document to report back to BHL Annual Meeting attendees on the effect of the transition BHL has been undergoing on the BHL-Wiki Working Group. She prepared the a summary set out in this
document
to be read by attendees prior to the meeting.
BHL Day 2026
Ambrosia10 and
Sabine von Mering
have also submitted and have had accepted an abstract to the public symposium
BHL Day 2026
which will take place at the Natural History Museum, on Wednesday 29 April. They will be presenting on research they and their colleagues had undertaken on flowering plant genera named after women and the two research papers they and their colleagues published on their research. Wikidata was used to create the linked open dataset for all flowering plant genera whose names honour women.
Wikidata type specimen data model
Wikidata WikiProject Natural History Specimen Data Model
In 2024 members of the BHL Wiki working group raised the issue of the need for a Wikidata type specimen item data model. See this
issue
raised in the BHL-Wiki Working Group Github repository. This issue was the inspiration for work undertaken by two members of the BHL-Wiki working group Siobhan Leachman (
Ambrosia10
), Chair of the BHL-Wiki working group, and Brodie Satherley (
Dactylantha
) from
Auckland War Memorial Museum
(an affiliate of BHL).
Siobhan and Brodie created the
WikiProject Natural History Specimen Data Model
to document this collaboration and proceeded to propose Wikidata properties and create documentation for both a Wikidata type specimen item data model as well as a Wikimedia Commons data model for the structured data that should be attached to specimen images.
They have also created “how to” documentation for both data models, cross walks to the Darwin Core data standard for both models as well as a documentation for an example upload/creation of type specimen Wikidata items undertaken via OpenRefine. All the documentation produced has been shared on
Zenodo
to expose it to the wider Biodiversity community. The data models, crosswalks and “how to” documentation have also been shared on
Wikimedia Commons
Siobhan and Brodie are grateful for the feedback received from other members of the BHL-Wiki working group as well as the wider Wiki community.
Previous
"Biodiversity Heritage Library report"
In this issue
March 2026
From the team
Albania report
Aruba report
Bolivia report
Brazil report
Colombia report
Czech Republic report
Germany report
India report
Italy report
New Zealand report
North Macedonia report
Portugal report
Serbia report
Sweden report
Switzerland report
UK report
Ukraine report
USA report
Biodiversity Heritage Library report
AvoinGLAM report
Memory of the World report
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