Dear BHL Colleagues: 

I want to thank you all again for your work on BHL over the years. As I mentioned on the BHL Staff call last week, I began my professional career at the Smithsonian and succumbed to the temptation to feel that such a large institution, so rich (relatively speaking) in resources, would be able to easily contain multitudes. 

In 2004/2005 when I began work on two science projects (the Biological Centrali Americana and the US Exploring Expedition -- both now mostly in BHL!). The publications from both these naturalist projects were scattered around the world and no one institution or library could create a full digital version alone. 

Working with the core group of BHL partners, Tom Garnett (at the Smithsonian), Chris Freeland and Doug Holland (Missouri Botanical Garden), Graham Higley (Natural History Museum, London), Tom Moritz (AMNH), and, of course Cathy Norton (MBLWHOI Library), Constance Rinaldo (MCZ/Harvard), and Nancy Gwinn (Smithsonian), created the initial partnership of 10 (soon 12) institutions and the BHL was formed. 

As Darwin, et al., noted, “The cultivation of natural science cannot be efficiently carried on without reference to an extensive library”. In the past nearly 20 years, BHL has become that “extensive library”. It is this idea of a global collaboration in service to science, to biodiversity, to sustainability on our only planet, that has been the motivating force in my time with BHL. And also for many of you.

Though I’ll remain active in the biodiversity community, I’ll close with a quote from a different domain, literature. William Faulkner’s Nobel prize speech often comes to my mind when I think of the fragility of our world: 

“I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.” -- William Faulkner’s speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1950

Faulkner was addressing a clear existential threat at that time, global nuclear war. As we now know, the seeds of two more quiet crises, those of climate change and biodiversity loss, were already long planted. BHL is a key resource in finding solutions to these crises and as many have said, “if BHL didn’t exist, it would have to be built again.”

It’s because of all of you, and the others no longer with BHL that I believe that BHL will, as Faulkner noted, not only endure, but also prevail. 

All the best,

Martin

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Martin R. Kalfatovic (he/him/his)

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinkalfatovic/ |  VIAF ID: 32094717 (Personal) | ORCID ID: 0000-0002-4563-4627 (Personal)