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News
Featured Books
    All Featured Books
    Book of the Month Series
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    Fossil Stories
    Garden Stories
    Monsters Are Real
    Page Frights
    Her Natural History
    Earth Optimism 2020
Tech Blog
Visit BHL
  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
  • User Stories
  • Campaigns
    • Fossil Stories
    • Garden Stories
    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
  • Tech Blog
  • Visit BHL
Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts from November 2014

Blog Reel, Featured Books

The Stories Seeds Tell

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Since the mid-19 century, seed and nursery catalogs have reflected the agricultural and horticultural landscape of the United States. These catalogs—which began as guides to medicinal herbs, and are still printed today—often contain lists of plant varieties and gardening advice.
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November 28, 2014byPatrick Randall
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Of Birds and Poetry: Alexander Wilson and The Foresters

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210 years ago, in an autumn not unlike our own today, Alexander Wilson set out with two companions on a 1,300 mile trek, mostly on foot, from Philadelphia to Niagara Falls. Enchanted by the natural beauty of his adopted homeland, Wilson, Scottish by birth, detailed his two-month-long adventure in an epic 2,219 line poem entitled The Foresters: A Poem Descriptive of a Pedestrian Journey to the Falls of Niagara in the Autumn of 1804.

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November 25, 2014byGrace Costantino
BHL News, Blog Reel

The Latest News from BHL

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Sharks, Passenger Pigeons, Scientific Illustrations, Crowdsourcing, National Agricultural Library, GBIF, and Semantic Metadata. What do all these things have in common? They’re all BHL news stories from the past few months! Get the latest BHL project news in our latest quarterly report and newsletter! Don’t get our newsletter?
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November 21, 2014byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Lepidochromy: Butterfly Transfer Prints

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Horace Waller was an English missionary and anti-slavery activist in the 19th century. In 1859 Waller joined the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA). As Lay Superintendent to the UMCA, Waller befriended the famous missionary Dr. David Livingstone and botanist John Kirk who were in Africa as part of the British government-funded Zambezi Expedition.

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November 20, 2014byDaria Wingreen-Mason
BHL News, Blog Reel, Tech Updates

Digital Object Identifiers and BHL

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The importance and need for unique, persistent identifiers for reliable access to published literature has become widely accepted, and the literature for the biodiversity informatics community is no exception.  For published works, these generally take the form of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). BHL has been consistently assigning CrossRef DOIs to monographic publications for three years. However, the number of items in BHL with DOIs remains relatively small with just over 68,000 assigned to date.  In addition to the remaining monographs, BHL now also has over 140,000 articles identified, primarily via BioStor.
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November 19, 2014byCarolyn Sheffield
Blog Reel, User Stories

Rejuvenating Centuries’ Old Botany with Phytogeography

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Here’s a word of the day for you: Phytogeography. Phytogeography is a branch of biogeography that investigates the geographic distribution of plants and the effect that the earth’s surface has on that distribution. To go further down the rabbit hole, biogeography studies the distribution of species and organisms now and throughout time.
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November 13, 2014byGrace Costantino
BHL News, Blog Reel

Crowdsourcing and BHL: Current Projects that Allow Users to Help Us Improve Our Library!

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Recent crowdsourcing initiatives are revolutionizing scientific research, allowing the public to help scientists and researchers document, identify, and better understand biodiversity. For example, the Atlas of Living Australia’s FieldData program allows anyone to contribute sightings, photos and observational data to help researchers and natural resource management groups collect and manage biodiversity data.
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November 6, 2014byGrace Costantino and Trish Rose-Sandler

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. Headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, D.C., BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”

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