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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 by Grace Costantino

Blog Reel, Featured Books

Bateman’s Orchidaceae: Exploring One of the Rarest – and Largest – Orchid Books

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“The Librarian’s Nightmare.”

Such is the name given to a delightful and quirky vignette found within a very rare, and very special, orchid book: James Bateman’s The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala ([1837]-1843).

This vignette, the work of caricaturist George Cruikshank, depicts a group of men struggling to lift an enormous book using a pulley system while a harried taskmaster with a megaphone attempts to direct their work and demons dance about with impish glee on the sidelines.

The vignette’s caption, translated from the Greek, reads “a big book is a big evil”.

The scene is a humorous commentary on the massive size of Bateman’s orchid book. At about 30” x 22” and weighing in at over 38 lbs, it is the “largest botanical book ever produced with lithographic plates”.

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July 19, 2018byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, User Stories

Uncovering Cryptic Species and More with the Biodiversity Heritage Library

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Using molecular species delimitation methods, Dr. Fernando Á. Fernández-Álvarez, a post-doc at Institut de Ciències del Mar (CSIC) in Barcelona, and his colleagues[1] found that what is currently described as Ommastrephes bartramii actually represents four different species. After examining previous descriptions in the literature, three synonymized names have been proposed for resurrection accordingly. This research comprises one of four chapters in Fernández-Álvarez’s Ph.D. thesis, and the manuscript is currently under preparation for submission to a journal.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library proved to be a vital resource for these research, allowing Fernández-Álvarez to easily locate literature about relevant synonymized names, many of which were published in the 19th century.

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July 12, 2018byGrace Costantino
BHL News, Blog Reel

The Biodiversity Heritage Library Adds Lloyd Library & Museum as a New Affiliate

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library is pleased to welcome the Lloyd Library & Museum as its newest Affiliate.

Founded in the 1870s, the Lloyd Library & Museum’s origins trace back to a collection of reference materials acquired by the brothers John Uri Lloyd (1849-1936) and Curtis Gates Lloyd (1859-1926), both trained pharmacists of the botanical medicine era. The Library, which continues to build its collection thanks to an endowment established by Curtis Lloyd, holds approximately 150,000 volumes on a range of topics, including botany, mycology, herbal medicine, gardening, and horticulture.

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July 5, 2018byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, User Stories

For the Love of Cider: Phenotyping Apples with Modern Techniques and Historic Texts

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Dr. Gregory Peck, an Assistant Professor in the Horticulture Section of the School of Integrative Plant Science at Cornell University, has been assessing a large number of apple genotypes for their potential use in hard cider production. Through this work, he has discovered inconsistencies between many U.S. varieties and their original counterparts. He recently teamed up with Dr. Gayle Volk at the United States Department of Agriculture to uncover the truth behind these enigmatic cultivars.

“We employed DNA fingerprinting tools to confirm our suspicions that these were misnamed cultivars,” explains Peck. “But now we’re left with a mystery. What are the misidentified cultivars?”

As it turns out, it’s a mystery that the Biodiversity Heritage Library can help solve.

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June 5, 2018byGrace Costantino
BHL News, Blog Reel

The Biodiversity Heritage Library Adds Museum für Naturkunde Berlin as a New Member

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library is pleased to welcome the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN) as a new Member. MfN is the first German museum to join the Biodiversity Heritage Library as a Member.

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May 29, 2018byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, User Stories

BHL through the Eyes of a Student: An Inspiring Window to Natural History

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Graduate student Otto Stenberg has experienced the value of historical literature, and the benefits of BHL, first-hand throughout his studies on molecular and evolutionary biology at the University of Helsinki. One of these most memorable instances occurred during an undergraduate research project on pinniped evolution.

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May 10, 2018byGrace Costantino
BHL News, Blog Reel, Tech Updates

Announcing Full Text Search on BHL!

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We’re thrilled to announce that full text search is now available on the Biodiversity Heritage Library!

With this new functionality, search results in the library will display hits for your term in both the bibliographic information (i.e. title, author, subject, publisher, related titles and series, etc.) as well as the full text of books in BHL.

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May 7, 2018byGrace 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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