All posts from 2021

Over a quarter of a million nature images are now freely available through the BHL Flickr!

Since 2011, we’ve been making many of the illustrations from BHL’s collection available via Flickr. While it has long been a community favorite amongst our audiences, in 2020 our Flickr’s popularity increased significantly when it received considerable media attention in outlets including Colossal, Laughing Squid, Český rozhlas, ZME Science, Cultura Inquieta, Hyperallergic, Graffica, Smithsonian Magazine, Open Culture, la Repubblica, Genbeta, My Modern Met (en Español), eCulture Greece, Daily Geek Show, Вокруг Света, Atlas Obscura, Shifter, Lifehacker, Indiehoy, Microsiervos, and Vice. As a result of this publicity in February 2020, we saw a 518% increase in daily views on Flickr images (2.5 million daily views compared to an average of 400,000) and an over 100% increase in visits and unique visitors to BHL. This popularity continued throughout the year, culminating in over 343 million views on images in 2020 alone—a 123% increase over 2019, bringing our all-time views to over 902 million!

Last year also offered a unique opportunity to substantially build our Flickr collection. With many of our partners working virtually in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we focused on projects to improve our digital collections remotely. This work included uploading images to Flickr. In 2020, over 40 BHL partner staff and volunteers contributed to the upload of over 90,000 new images to Flickr—a nearly 200% increase in images uploaded compared to 2019.

We have updated the bibliography pages in BHL to streamline the presentation of information about and metadata export options for content in the Library.

On 23 March 2020, the U.K. went into its first national lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Social distancing and teleworking became the norm, and the walls of our homes became, in many ways, the boundaries of our individual worlds.

Amateur mycologist Clare Blencowe was eager to find a positive distraction from the realities of life during a pandemic. The Biodiversity Heritage Library’s open access collections, which for Blencowe had become a welcome refuge from the continuous onslaught of negative news articles, now became the inspiration for a new, socially distanced way to connect with other fungi lovers—in the form of “The Mycological Book Club”, an online, Twitter-based book club with a particular focus on open access literature.

The pineapple, indigenous to South America and domesticated and harvested there for centuries, was a late comer to Europe. The fruit followed in its cultivation behind the tomato, corn, potato, and other New World imports. Delicious but challenging and expensive to nurture in chilly climes and irresistible to artists and travelers for its curious structure, the pineapple came to represent many things. For Europeans, it was first a symbol of exoticism, power, and wealth, but it was also an emblem of colonialism, weighted with connections to plantation slavery.

Originating from the region around the Paraná and Paraguay Rivers (present-day Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina), it was an important economic plant in the development of Indigenous civilizations in the Americas. The Tupi-Guarani and Carib peoples called the fruit, a staple crop, nanas (excellent fruit) and several varieties were grown. As well as food, the pineapple was a source of medicine, fermented to become alcohol, its fibers made into robes and bow strings and thread for cloth.

As I am writing this, Melbourne is at the end of its second wave of COVID-19 and I have been separated from the library collections that I work with at Museums Victoria for six months, 25 days, 21 hours, and around 12 minutes… but who’s counting?!

The pandemic has created a lot of challenges, not least working out how to be a librarian of an overwhelmingly print-based collection from a distance, but this time working from home has also afforded me opportunities to present a handful of webinars, the most recent being a guest lecture on rare book cataloguing for library and information management students.

I can say without a doubt that this would have been a near impossible task without the Biodiversity Heritage Library.