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News
Featured Books
    All Featured Books
    Book of the Month Series
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    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

Of Birds and Poetry: Alexander Wilson and The Foresters

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210 years ago, in an autumn not unlike our own today, Alexander Wilson set out with two companions on a 1,300 mile trek, mostly on foot, from Philadelphia to Niagara Falls. Enchanted by the natural beauty of his adopted homeland, Wilson, Scottish by birth, detailed his two-month-long adventure in an epic 2,219 line poem entitled The Foresters: A Poem Descriptive of a Pedestrian Journey to the Falls of Niagara in the Autumn of 1804.

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November 25, 2014byGrace Costantino
BHL News, Blog Reel

The Latest News from BHL

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Sharks, Passenger Pigeons, Scientific Illustrations, Crowdsourcing, National Agricultural Library, GBIF, and Semantic Metadata. What do all these things have in common? They’re all BHL news stories from the past few months! Get the latest BHL project news in our latest quarterly report and newsletter! Don’t get our newsletter?
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November 21, 2014byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, User Stories

Rejuvenating Centuries’ Old Botany with Phytogeography

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Here’s a word of the day for you: Phytogeography. Phytogeography is a branch of biogeography that investigates the geographic distribution of plants and the effect that the earth’s surface has on that distribution. To go further down the rabbit hole, biogeography studies the distribution of species and organisms now and throughout time.
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November 13, 2014byGrace Costantino
BHL News, Blog Reel

Crowdsourcing and BHL: Current Projects that Allow Users to Help Us Improve Our Library!

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Recent crowdsourcing initiatives are revolutionizing scientific research, allowing the public to help scientists and researchers document, identify, and better understand biodiversity. For example, the Atlas of Living Australia’s FieldData program allows anyone to contribute sightings, photos and observational data to help researchers and natural resource management groups collect and manage biodiversity data.
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November 6, 2014byGrace Costantino and Trish Rose-Sandler
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Monsters Are Real

The Beautiful Monster: Mermaids

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In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed out from Spain with a mission to find a western trade route to Asia. Instead, he found a whole “New World”…and something altogether more mysterious. On January 9, 1493, near the Dominican Republic, Columbus spotted three “mermaids.” How did he describe them? “They are not as beautiful as they are painted, since in some ways they have a face like a man” (History.com). The myth of a marine human extends as far back as 5,000 BCE, when the Babylonians worshipped a fish-tailed god named Oannes.
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October 31, 2014byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Monsters Are Real

The Octopus…The Monster that Isn’t

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Such a description conjures up images of a great behemoth, perhaps with sharp fangs, great talons, and fiery red eyes. It was given by George Shaw in a lecture to the Royal Institute and published in 1809. It is a description of the Curled Octopus (Eledone cirrhosa), reaching a total size of 5-15 inches. Not quite the beast the description implies… The octopus, like the squid (aka kraken), has long held an unwarranted reputation as a monster.
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October 30, 2014byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Monsters Are Real

Release the Kraken!

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Science knows it by the name Architeuthis dux. For centuries, however, it was known by an altogether more infamous one – The Kraken. Aristotle first introduced us to the giant squid (which he called teuthos) in 350 BCE, and then, in AD 77-79, Pliny the Elder related a tale of a “polyp” that was killed during its attempt to steal salted fish from the fish ponds in Carteia (Ellis, pg. 123). Described as having 30-foot long arms, the beast has been identified as a squid. Giant squids have been seen throughout the world’s oceans, but they are quite common in the seas around Norway and Greenland.
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October 30, 2014byGrace Costantino
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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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