All posts from May 2011

“How old is that fossil and how do you know it?” This is the introductory sentence, and the question addressed, in this week’s book of the week, How Old are Fossils (1927), by Sharat Kumar Roy. According to the author, this is a question that is often asked by visitors to a museum, but it is also a question that is particularly time-consuming to answer.

On May 20th, Graham Higley, head of library and information services at the Natural History Museum in London, accepted the 2010 John Thackray medal, which was awarded to the BHL in recognition of our past three years of work building our digital library. Mr. Higley (pictured left) accepted this award on behalf of Tom Garnett, Director of the BHL.

This week we feature a user that has been active in BHL development since the beginning of the project, helping to see it go from a single digitization instance to an incredible digital library with over 34 million pages of digitized literature. An adjunct research scientist in the Entomology Department at the Smithsonian Institution, we are proud to highlight Dr. F. Christian Thompson.

Ever wonder what people believed about natural history in Shakespeare’s time? Well, even if you haven’t, we’re going to tell you. One of our BHL colleagues at Harvard brought the book Natural History in Shakespeare’s Time (1896), by H.W. Seager, to our attention, and we knew we just had to highlight it.

On December 16, 2010 Science released a paper, “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books” that describes data mining research using a vast textual archive created by the Google Books. The abstract reads, “We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of “culturomics”, focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. ‘Culturomics’ extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.”

This week, we featured one of our BHL users, Dr. Torsten Dikow, in our regular blog series, BHL and our Users. With a focus on flies in his research, Dr. Dikow identified his favorite book in BHL, which we’re highlighting today as our book of the week.

Meet Torsten Dikow, a postdoc based in the BHL partner institution, the Field Museum, who not only uses BHL heavily for his own research on flies, but also works to help BHL acquire the rights to digitize in-copyright publications by encouraging smaller natural history museums and scientific societies to grant digitization permissions to BHL. We are so very thankful for his support and advocacy on our behalf!