All posts from March 2021

“To her mind the truths of science seem revealed.”

That’s how Phebe A. Hanaford, author of Daughters of America (c. 1882), described naturalist Graceanna Lewis, one of the first three woman to be accepted into the Academy of Natural Sciences. But Lewis was not only one of the first professionally acknowledged women naturalists; she was also an abolitionist and social reformer who worked for the advancement of science as well as human rights. Researchers can find many publications by and about this intriguing woman in the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives’ Digital Library and the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Join us for a special closing event presented as part of the 2021 BHL Annual Meeting!

Notes from Nature: The Biodiversity Heritage Collections
Date and Time: Friday, 16 April 2021 @ 1130-1230 UTC
Location: Online (via Zoom webinar)

Discover the natural world through a vast collection of biodiversity knowledge online. Find out how Singapore and France have worked together across boundaries to advance biodiversity literature, digitisation and public outreach efforts.

This discussion is organised by the National Library Singapore and Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, France in partnership with the Biodiversity Heritage Library, the world’s largest open access online repository of biodiversity knowledge.

Registration is now open for our virtual BHL Day 2021 on 14 April, presented as part of our 2021 Annual Meeting! Themed “Reflections In Crises”, the program will include sessions reflecting on BHL’s roles in addressing the biodiversity crisis, challenges arising from COVID-19, and systemic racism in natural history collections.

Dr. Margaret S. Collins (1922-1996), a renowned expert on termite ecology and distribution, taught as a professor and administrator at Howard University, Florida A&M University, and Federal City College (now University of The District of Columbia) for over 35 years. Upon her retirement from teaching, Collins continued her work on termites at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History as a research associate from 1983 to 1996.

Over the course of her career, Collins published more than forty articles spanning the biogeography, physiology, chemical defenses, and taxonomy of termites. Collins also collected specimens in the United States, Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Barbados, Belize, Suriname, the Cayman Islands, Guyana, Guatemala, and Panama. When she contracted dengue fever on an expedition in Guyana in 1983-1984 and was forced into a long hiatus from field work, she turned her focus to updating and preserving the termite specimens at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Eventually Collins returned to field research in 1994 when she once again traveled to Guyana to collect termites. In April 1996, Collins died while conducting field work in the Cayman Islands.

Save the date for a virtual BHL Day 2021 on 14 April, presented as part of our 2021 Annual Meeting! Themed “Reflections In Crises”, the program will include sessions reflecting on BHL’s roles in addressing the biodiversity crisis, challenges arising from COVID-19, and systemic racism in natural history collections.

Michelle Marshall is an independent researcher and creator of Historical SciArt, a research initiative dedicated to women in historic scientific illustration. In this guest post, Marshall shares more about how BHL helps empower her research on women in science.

Our latest quarterly newsletter is now available! From exciting news about our image collection in Flickr to an upcoming online Wikipedia Editing Workshop on women in science, don’t miss the latest news from the BHL community.