All posts by Grace Costantino

Happy Moth Week! National Moth Week is an annual event that celebrates the diversity and magnificence of moths. By partnering with online biological databases, National Moth Week encourages everyone to become a citizen scientist by helping map moth distributions and provide information about these amazing species. BHL is celebrating moth week by highlighting select species gleaned from one of our favorite BHL books: Butterflies and Moths: Shown to the Children (1910).

On April 15, 2013, during a ceremony hosted at the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) at the Pretoria National Botanical Garden in Pretoria, South Africa, BHL-Africa officially launched as our sixth global node. Working within the BHL consortium, BHL-Africa aims to provide open access to the valuable information held in Africa’s biodiversity institutions.

BHL and the Missouri Botanical Garden are pleased to announce a major milestone reached in the project, “Purposeful Gaming and BHL”. Dartmouth College’s Tiltfactor was chosen to design the game that will help improve access to texts from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL).

The Purposeful Gaming and BHL project is based at the Missouri Botanical Garden (MOBOT) in St Louis, Missouri. In the fall of 2013, MOBOT was awarded a $449,641 grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to test new means of using crowdsourcing and gaming to support the enhancement of texts from the BHL.

Today, we present an example of how BHL is being utilized to expand an award-winning database on the insect order Lepidoptera!  Generic Names of Moths of the World: Generic Names and their Type-species by Brian Pitkin and Paul Jenkins is a catalogue of more than 32,000 genus-group names of the insect order Lepidoptera. First launched in July 2004, the site was awarded the Podalirius Star in November 2004.