User:Nicolekearney

I'm Nicole Kearney, Manager of BHL Australia, the Australian branch of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL).

I am passionate about making the world's biodiversity heritage literature freely accessible and discoverable, and about bringing this literature into the modern linked network of scholarly research using persistent identifiers, particularly Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), ORCIDs and Wikidata IDs.

Possible conflict of interest

I have been an employee of Museums Victoria since February 2003. Since October 2014, my salary has been funded by a grant provided by the Atlas of Living Australia (CSIRO) to manage the BHL Australia project (hosted by Museums Victoria). Since October 2020, a portion of my salary has been provided by the Smithsonian Institution to lead BHL's global Persistent Identifier Working Group and retrospectively assign Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to historic publications.

In 2023, BHL Australia received two grants to gather the history of Victoria’s field naturalists' clubs and to share the invaluable contribution these community organisations have made to Victoria's heritage.

The first, a Public Record Office Victoria (PROV) Local History Grant, is funding the digitisation of the legacy publications of Victoria’s field naturalists’ clubs and the creation of an online collection on the BHL website (see Capturing the history of the regional field naturalist clubs of Victoria, Australia). I am managing the grant, but the grant funding is being used in its entirety to employ a Digitisation Officer within the BHL Australia team (for 1 day/week for 1 year).

The second, a Wikimedia Australia Partner Project Grant, is enabling the creation of Wikipedia pages and Wikidata records for each field naturalists' club, their publications and people, and the uploading of archival images into Wikimedia Commons (see The Regional Field Naturalists Clubs of Victoria). The funding is being used to employ a Wikimedian in Residence (1 day/week for 5 months), and to pay travel costs from Melbourne to each Victorian region to meet with club members and review/capture historic archives and photographs (we're travelling by train).

The publications of Victoria’s field naturalists contain critical information about the biodiversity of their specific region across time. They also detail the rich history of the organisations themselves and the people behind them. For those who were not white men, these community publications may contain the only published reference of their name (references critical to Wikipedia’s notability requirements).