All posts from July 2016

In honor of the first Olympics to take place in Brazil, we are highlighting a book contributed by The Field Museum featuring birds of South America, Le Vaillant’s Histoire naturelle d’une partie d’oiseaux nouveaux et rares de l’Amerique et des Indes (1801). Among several titles chosen for digitization from the Field Museum Library’s impressive Edward E. Ayer Ornithological Library, housed in the collections of the Mary W. Runnells Rare Book Room, the entry for the volume in Catalogue of the Edward E. Ayer Ornithological Library characterizes it as “a work intended to supplement his Hist. Nat. des Oiseaux d’Afrique (q.v.) by describing and figuring birds not properly included in that work.”

The 31 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) (http://www.spnhc2016.berlin/) was jointly hosted by the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and the Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum in Berlin, 20-25 June 2016. The SPNHC conference brings together representatives from natural history museums, universities, and biodiversity data aggregators and serves as a wonderful opportunity for BHL to connect with formal partner institutions, collaborators such as GBIF, as well as many BHL users.