All posts from April 2013

One of the BHL partner institutions, The Field Museum Library, was recently awarded a small grant from the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI) to contribute titles to the growing BHL corpus. The proposal entitled “Empowering Biodiversity Research,” allowed The Field Museum Library to contribute 34 new titles to the BHL.

It’s time to take a break from work and celebrate John James Audubon’s Birthday with the BHL! This was the man who is best remembered for his masterpiece Birds of America which is arguably the most prized Natural History work in existence. Just last year, the Smithsonian successfully digitized their entire set of all 435 copperplate etchings that contain 1,065 life-size birds representing around 500 species. Audubons’ birds are now available to be enjoyed and freely downloaded by all.

On April 15, 2013, BHL-Africa officially launched. BHL-Africa’s mission is to provide open access to the valuable biodiversity literature found within African libraries and institutions. The African consortium is hard at work identifying partners throughout the continent to sign an MOU and commit to working towards this noble objective.

Tarsiers are a family of small primates that today are found only in the islands of Southeast Asia. Among the species in the family is one of the world’s smallest primates – the Philippine Tarsier – weighing between 3.9-5.4 ounces (the world’s smallest primate is the Berthe’s Mouse Lemur). Tarsiers are perhaps most recognized for their enormous eyeballs, which are approximately as large as their entire brain.

BHL image files are hosted by the Internet Archive (IA). The IA will be upgrading their power 16-17 April 2013. This will result in planned outages to the system. These outages will affect BHL’s ability to serve page images, generate PDFs, and downloads of certain file types.Searching and browsing BHL metadata will not be affected by this outage.Please be aware that in addition to the planned outages listed below, there may be residual and temporary outages around planned downtime.Scheduled downtimes:In the event of any additional major outages, please monitor this site for more information.Sorry for the inconvenience that this will cause our BHL users, but in the end this will provide better service.