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News
Featured Books
    All Featured Books
    Book of the Month Series
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Campaigns
    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 August 2015

BHL News, Blog Reel

Smorball and Beanstalk: Games that aren’t just fun to play but help science too

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As game players are growing beanstalks and leading the Eugene Mellonballers to victory, historic books are being saved from digital oblivion.

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August 28, 2015byTrish Rose-Sandler
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Brilliant and Remarkable Birds of Brazil

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One of the joyous things about being a Librarian caring for special and rare collections is that you frequently find something remarkable and new to you in those collections. Add on the role of BHL staffer and this multiplies through digitization requests posted by users of BHL. Approximately five years ago a request was posted for a book unknown to me by an artist I had not come across. The catalogue record flagged that it was a folio of coloured plates which consigned the volume to a long queue for bespoke in-house scanning. Time passed and circumstances changed, and earlier this year I was informed that it had been scanned and was ready for loading to BHL.
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August 27, 2015byAlison Harding
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Beyond Shells: The Birth of Malacology

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Until the late 18th century, the study of mollusks was based largely on shells. Very little research or published information existed about molluscan anatomy and soft tissues. Giuseppe Saverio Poli, recognized by many as the father of malacology, changed this with his monumental publication, Testacea utriusque Siciliae eorumque historia et anatome (1791-1827). Poli, born in 1746 in Molfetta, Italy, studied classics, theology, and natural sciences at the University of Padua.
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August 20, 2015byGrace Costantino
BHL News, Blog Reel

Historic Field Diaries from BHL Australia Now in BHL!

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This post was originally published on the Museum Victoria Blog. See the original post here.

In November 2014, Museum Victoria started a project to digitize and transcribe the field diaries in our collection. These diaries, handwritten by Australia’s early field naturalists long before the days of electronic notetaking, are rich in scientific data and historic detail. They provide insights into past species distribution and abundance, as well as the trials and wonders experienced on historic expeditions. They are fascinating sources of information and yet very few people have ever read them.

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August 18, 2015byNicole Kearney
Blog Reel, User Stories

The Tarantupedia, an online encyclopaedia for the biggest spiders in the world

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Tarantulas are amazing. Not only do they include the largest of all spiders, with some species reaching a legspan the size of a dinner plate, but they are arguably some of the most beautiful too. While famous for giants that inhabit the jungles of South America, some species barely grow larger than your thumb nail. Some species live on trees in damp forests while others live in self-constructed tubular burrows in the ground in some of the most inhospitable deserts. Some have special protective hairs on their bodies which cause extreme itching when they come into contact with the mucous membranes of potential predators, while others produce a hissing sound in self-defense.

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August 13, 2015byDimitri Kambas
BHL News, Blog Reel

The Arcadia Fund Awards Grant to Support The Field Book Project

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The Smithsonian Libraries received a $511,200 grant from the Arcadia Fund for The Field Book Project to provide free, online access to the Smithsonian’s field books on biodiversity research.
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August 7, 2015byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Featured Books

I spy something fowl…

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Field books are important primary source materials for biodiversity research. Their pages are the first to document the thoughts, observations, musings, and raw data generated or gathered by a scientist while in the field. They are the foundation upon which published natural history literature is based. The Field Book Project (FBP) is working to improve access to field books in the Smithsonian’s collections. Digitized versions of these field books are made available in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). There are currently over 500 field books from FBP in BHL. One of these field books was written by Joshua F. B (Fry Bullitt) Camblos (1916-2012).
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August 6, 2015byGrace Costantino

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About BHL

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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