All posts by Grace Costantino

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) welcomes The Field Museum as a new member. One of the original founding institutions of BHL in 2007, The Field Museum has participated in the Biodiversity Heritage Library as an Affiliate since 2012 and now represents the consortium’s 16th Member. Founded in 1893 as the Columbian Museum of Chicago, The Field Museum has been inspiring curiosity about life on earth for more than 120 years.

Art is an integral part of scientific investigation and documentation. Before the advent of photography, illustrations were used to capture intricate species details, habitat appearance, and even behaviors such as predation. Photography gained popularity as a visual recording method within scientific publications in the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries, over time increasing the efficiency and accuracy by which nature could be recorded. Scientific illustrations and photographs are an important part of the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

BHL Members and Affiliates met in Chicago, IL, for the 2015 Annual Meeting (17-18 March 2015). The annual meeting is a chance for BHL Member and Affiliate representatives to learn what is happening around BHL and to give updates from their own institutions. This year, the meeting was hosted by Christine Giannoni (Museum Librarian & Head of Library Collections, The Field Museum Library) at The Field Museum, one of the original founding institutions of the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Since 2012, The Field Museum has participated in BHL as an Affiliate. The venue was a decidedly appropriate one, as, on the first day of the meeting, The Field Museum announced their decision to join BHL as a Member institution!

Since the release of Science Gossip a little less than a month ago, 3,600 volunteers have enthusiastically completed 160,000 classifications of natural history illustrations from the pages of 19th century science periodicals!

We’ve spent a fun-filled week exploring the history, art, and science of gardening with our Garden Stories event.

Carrie H. Lippincott (featured in our previous post) exploited the potential that seed catalogs offer in a business setting. Ethel Z. Bailey recognized the potential of seed catalogs in an entirely different application: cultivated plant research. Ethel Z. Bailey, daughter of Liberty Hyde Bailey (botanist, a foremost leader in American horticulture, and the first dean of Cornell University’s College of Agriculture) and Annette Smith Bailey, was born in Ithaca, New York on November 17, 1889.