In Memoriam: David Remsen, Key Founding Figure in the Biodiversity Heritage Library | BHL Blog

Last week, the biodiversity informatics community and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) lost one of its most creative minds. David Remsen lost his lifelong battle with mental illness and passed away on Wednesday, December 14, 2022. As a staff member of the MBLWHOI Library working with BHL’s inaugural Vice-Chair, Cathy Norton, David’s innovative and groundbreaking work in taxonomic name finding (uBio) and parsing taxonomic index (Nomenclature Zoologicus) laid the groundwork for much of BHL’s taxonomic infrastructure powered by the Global Names Architecture.

In 2006, at the Smithsonian meeting that formalized the creation of BHL, David, along with eventual founding Technical Director Chris Freeland, led the work that incorporated groundbreaking taxonomic bioinformatics in the eventual BHL user interface. That same year, he joined key BHL organizers at the TDWG meeting at the Missouri Botanical Garden that outlined the informatics components of BHL. Read rest of the article here.

Source: In Memoriam: David Remsen. BHL has lost one of its key founding figures. / BHL Blog