All posts by Grace Costantino

The 2019 BHL Annual Meeting was held 29 April – 3 May in Ithaca, New York. Hosted by the Albert R. Mann Library of Cornell University, the Meeting brought together 34 participants from 23 institutions, representing 9 countries.

As BHL Program Director Martin Kalfatovic noted: “The BHL Annual meeting is an opportunity for the partners, from all over the world, to come together to chart the course of the BHL for the coming year. The conversations, both formal and informal, are key to keeping the Library relevant to both its global user community and the partners that sustain the BHL.”

The meeting agenda included reports on the state of the consortium, facilitated discussions around key program areas, a strategic planning session, a panel session with BHL partner representatives, a public event with a panel of Cornell scientists, and many amazing tours and excursions.

Insects trapped in amber. For anyone who has seen Jurassic Park, this description immediately conjures up familiar imagery. In the movie, such a fortuitously-preserved mosquito provided the means to bring dinosaurs back to life. While that may be the realm of science fiction, in the realm of science, such amber time capsules are still a valuable window into the past, allowing scientists today to examine ancient specimens and, sometimes, discover new species.

This year, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and our global partners celebrated Women’s History Month with an international social media campaign: Her Natural History: A Celebration of Women in Natural History.

We were delighted with the outcomes and impact of the campaign. #HerNaturalHistory had reached over 7.5 million people, with over 52 million impressions on content and over 3,100 accounts participating on social media. The campaign allowed BHL to expand its reach and engagement with existing and new audiences in notable ways, resulting in a 35% average increase in overall social reach and a 41% increase in overall social engagements compared to 2018 averages. #HerNaturalHistory also encouraged increased engagement with the works of women in BHL, fostering a 122% increase in views on books in the Women in Natural History Book Collection compared to 2018 monthly averages.

We invite you to explore the results on the campaign in-depth within the Her Natural History campaign report.

There are more described species of beetles (order Coleoptera) than any other group of organisms on the planet. With over 350,000 described extant and extinct species and subspecies, beetles represent about 40% of all described arthropods and about 25% of all described species.

One of the myriad families of beetles is Monotomidae, with over 250 described species [3]. Commonly called minute clubbed beetles, the family includes such species as Europs frontalis (found primarily in the tropics) and Pycnotomina cavicolle (found exclusively in forested regions of eastern North America).

Dr. Thomas McElrath, Insect Collections Manager at the Illinois Natural History Survey, has been studying the systematics of Coleoptera for nine years. He is currently working on compiling a worldwide checklist of the Monotomidae. The Biodiversity Heritage Library is a crucial resource for his research on this project.

On 10 April 2019, we will implement additions and changes to the export files available from the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

The updates involve the following:

1. A new set of exports will be created alongside the existing exports. The new set will contain only data for material that is hosted by BHL. No externally-hosted content will be included in these files. Because these files are added in addition to the existing export files, no existing users should be affected.
2. The BHL author Identifiers will be added to the creator.txt and partcreator.txt tab-delimited files. The format of these files will change to accommodate the additional data; the author identifier will now be the second “column” in each file. Because of this, anyone regularly harvesting from these files may be affected.

Wiki projects, including Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, contain the information that powers the web. Wikipedia is the fifth most-visited website in the world. To edit a Wiki project is to contribute content that could, potentially, be viewed by thousands or even millions of people over time, both on Wiki sites and on sites like Google and Facebook, which harvest data, including media, from Wiki sites.

For the #HerNaturalHistory campaign, the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden and the Smithsonian Libraries held three crowd-sourcing citizen science/citizen humanities events in March of 2019. These events were intended to bring new editors to Wiki projects, have editors add information about female scientists to Wikipedia, and have editors add information to BHL collections on Flickr and in Wikimedia Commons utilizing the Wikidata knowledge base/database/catalog.

Looking for a challenge? The Smithsonian Institution Archives and the Smithsonian Transcription Center are teaming up for a #HerNaturalHistory-themed transcription challenge. Starting today (8 March), help a team of #volunpeers transcribe field notes from conservation biologist Devra Kleiman and botanist Cleofé Calderon. Dive into observations of golden lion tamarins with Kleiman, who worked at Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park from 1972 to 2001. And head to South America with Calderón to collect grasses for Smithsonian’s Department of Botany.