“Promoting the protection and care of rabbits, both domestic and wild,” Saturday September 28 is International Rabbit Day and we couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate the Leporidae than to highlight some of our favorite literature about rabbits from the BHL collection.

Pl. LX from Johnson’s household book of nature

From our Darwin’s Library collection, a virtual reconstruction of the set of the surviving works held in Charles Darwin’s personal library, “The rabbit book” outlines the history of the rabbit, its varieties at the time, and provides instructions for their care and breeding. While a relatively quick read on such topics as the difference between rabbits and hares, treating dropsy (edema), and establishing a proper rabbit “court,” the most striking aspect of the book is its drawings of rabbit varieties from Angora to Full-lop. Check out our flickr image set of “The rabbit book” to see them all together.

Previous blog posts highlight another fantastic work about the Leporidae, James E. Harting’s “The Rabbit” (1898), as featured in our 2011-Year of the Rabbit post and Laurel Byrnes’ discussion of how the young Beatrix Potter’s love of natural history and study of rabbits inspired her famous children’s work, The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902).

Want to cozy up with a few more selections of Lepus literature from the BHL? See our burgeoning list of articles related rabbits and hares and a variety of works that mention the genus, and the many species of this group, via our taxonomic search functionality.

More information about International Rabbit Day can be found on the House Rabbit Society’s website http://rabbit.org/international-rabbit-day/.

As a bone-a-fide dog lover, it gives me great pleasure to highlight Baynes and Louis Agassiz Fuertes’ beautifully illustrated “The Book of Dogs: an intimate study of mankind’s best friend” as this week’s book of the week. In it, the famous ornithologist and illustrator  lends his hand to the descriptions and art of drawing various breeds of “man’s best friend” while Baynes tells stories of dog fame, adventure, and heroism, such as this one about Red Cross dogs in WWI:

pg. 55

“The Red Cross dogs rendered invaluable service in feeding and aiding the wounded. Each one carried a first-aid kit either strapped to its collar or in a small saddle pouch. When they found a soldier who was unconscious, they were taught to bring back his helmet, handkerchief, or some other small article as a token of the discovery. Many of them learned wholly to ignore the dead, but to bark loudly whenever they came upon a wounded man.” [pg. 73]

Published in 1919 by the National Geographic Society, this “study” remarks on the history of dogs but does little to dive deeply into the science behind this subspecies of Canidae. Canis lupus familiaris are a subspecies of Canis lupus or Gray Wolf. Dogs are one of 38 subspecies of C. lupus along with a series of wolves and the feral dog, otherwise known as dingos [1]. Dogs, dingos, and wolves can all interbreed and share morphological and behavioral similarities including being social, highly expressive, and (depending on your dog of course) intelligent animals. It is not certain when exactly dogs were first domesticated but recent evidence points to one of the oldest known domesticated dogs to 33,000 years ago [2]. A study from 2010 points to the Middle East as the most likely locality of origin of the subspecies [3].

http://synynyms.com/taxon/1228387

With such a rich history of domestication and intimacy with our species, one would think we’d have Canis lupus familiaris figured out, but it was not until recently that dogs’ taxonomy was resolved according to the Integrated Taxonomic Information System’s report. Linnaeus first described the domestic dog as Canis canis in Systema Naturae 1735 and later revised his own classification. As our good friend over at Synynyms.com illustrates, the taxonomic story of the dog has gone through many iterations including C. domesticus and C. familiaris, finally settling as a subspecies of C. lupus.

As pack animals, dogs lend themselves well to a close relationship with humans and have been highly selectively bred to serve a variety of roles. From the tiny Chihuahua to the Great Dane, nearly 280 official breeds are recognized by the Kennel Club and the American Kennel Club combined. Baynes and Fuertes discuss over 60 breeds in their book highlighting such classic favorites as the Collies, Greyhound, and Terriers (poor kitty!).

pg. 27

pg. 54

pg. 78

For more of Louis Agassiz Fuertes’ beautiful illustrations of our canine friends, please visit our flickr set for this book.

As all members of the C. lupus group can interbreed there are a wealth of possibilities for mix-breeds and as any “mutt” owner will tell you they make for some fantastic companions, bringing some the of the best of multiple breeds together. Popular mixes of today include Labradoodles (Labrador + Poodle), Puggles (Pug + Beagle), and well you figure it out… (Shih Tzu + Poodle).

No dog post would be complete without cute pictures, thus I bring you some of the best shots of our very own BHL Staff pooches:

Maggie taken by Tim Ashman

Rose

Rowan

Hadrian

Crash & Biscuit

Lilly, Maddy, & Bertie

Franklin

Ozzie

References

This is the third in a 4 part joint blog series by the Field Book Project (FBP) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), showcasing examples of digital connections between museum specimens, field book catalog records, and the resulting publications.

View post one | View post two

In 1899 Edward Harriman, President of the Union Pacific Railroad, turned a family vacation into a two month foray into Alaska. Originally proposed as a hunting expedition, it was transformed into a scientific exploring expedition on the advice of Clinton Hart Merriam, Chief of the Bureau of Biological Survey. Harriman and his family, accompanied by 126 researchers, traveled to Alaska aboard the S.S. George W. Elder. In the end, the work of the many researchers resulted in vast amounts of valuable scientific data, including the discovery of a new glacier and an array of floral and faunal specimens.

Reid Inlet, Glacier Bay 1899. Photographed by Edward S. Curtis.

Harriman and the Washington Academy of Sciences collaborated to fund the entire expedition, and Harriman chose researchers with diverse scientific backgrounds in order to collaborate on all fields of plant, animal, and earth science. After the expedition had ended, the scientists published a multi-volume Harriman Alaska Series, sometimes simply known as Alaska, of which vols. 6-7 were never published.

The Harriman Expedition is a particular favorite, because among the field documentation at Smithsonian Institution Archives, are two photograph albums of images from during the trip. Many of these images are available to view on Smithsonian Collection Search Center.

For such a large expedition with participants from across the Institution, you would think the field notes would be numerous and comprise their own collection. There are only as few as 6 field books from the Harriman Expedition found across the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) and Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA).

The photograph albums mentioned above reside in SIA; field notes of A. K. Fisher are in NMNH, Division of Mammals; T. H. Kearney’s journal is in the Department of Botany’s field book collection housed in the Main NMNH Library. Additionally there is item “Walpole, paintings, 1899 – 1904” whose abstract explains it may contain illustrations from the Harriman Expedition. One would only know this by the abstract or reading the field book content. Additionally these various field notes were cataloged by the Field Book Project, November 2011 – July 2012.

Specimens are equally difficult to track down. Though US National Museum received a collection of mollusks, birds, and plants, many of these specimens do not state they came from the expedition. One must know the collector, location, and/or time period.

Publications resulting from the expedition are a bit easier to locate, given the close relationship between Harriman and the Washington Academy of Sciences. In addition to the Harriman Alaska Expedition series linked above, the Biodiversity Heritage Library provides the following publications:

Whether an expedition is large or small, its resulting natural history documentation can lose its connections and become increasingly difficult to locate. Cataloging and digitization efforts by Smithsonian and consortiums like the Biodiversity Heritage Library offer researchers increasingly better odds of rediscovering those connections. Stay tuned for the fourth and final blog post in the series.

Over the years, the BHL consortium has grown from its initial core of 10 members to now 15 member institutions across the United States and the United Kingdom.

While each institution contributes its own unique set of materials to the BHL collection, many of our collections share similar materials. Thank goodness we do because we rely on each other to help fill in gaps in the BHL corpus. But this is easier said than done. Have you ever tried to amass a complete set of 90+ year old objects into one place?!

The quick and dirty explanation of our digitization process is as follows — BHL consortium libraries:

1. Work together to select books for scanning
2. Do our best to make sure we don’t send the same materials for scanning, i.e. “de-duplication”
3. Send the books from our shelves for scanning to various Internet Archive locations or to our own institutional scanning centers
4. Send the bibliographic data from our library catalogs
5. Render derivative files, such as the OCR (optical character recognition) text files
6. Aggregate the data files and images for every page of every book scanned into our back-end database managed by the Missouri Botanical Garden
7. Serve it all up via our website: http://biodiversitylibrary.org

And for those of us who prefer visuals:

Steps 1 and 2 can get complicated. Fast. Which is why we need the tools to help us coordinate who’s scanning what, when. To manage our communications we use an issue tracking system, in our case Countersoft’s Gemini system. Whenever you submit feedback via our website, a new issue, or ticket, is created in our system which we route to the appropriate BHL Staff for follow up. Send us feedback telling us something’s missing from our collection and we’ll try to find the BHL library who can send it for scanning. Sounds easy enough, right?

Wrong. Enter an old journal series which over the course of decades, centuries even, can modify its scope, alter its publication title and alter it again (and again…). Combine this with the changing practices of the printing, bookbinding, and library industries over the course of history and you have quite the task to gather the various pieces of the puzzle and arrange them into the complete picture of a publication.

Bibliography of Asiatic Society publications,

The Journal of the Asiatic Society is one of my favorite examples of how the BHL member libraries work together to accomplish this task.  The Journal changed its title various times since the late 18th Century and we have 4 of them in the BHL starting with Asiatick Researches (1788-1849) to the Journal and the Proceedings of the Asiatic Society (1905-1934). Since we started digitizing books for the BHL in 2007, this series has called on 7 different libraries to send various volumes for scanning in an effort to complete the digital set. The work still continues today. With so many libraries involved, it is not uncommon for there to be 3 different ways the titles were cataloged and 5 different ways the volumes were bound, for example, making the work of selection and de-duplication rather tricky.

Without systems that allow us to communicate in detail about who’s scanning precisely what, when, we’d have no way to aggregate 15 different physical library collections into a single BHL collection online. Our issue tracking system is just one of many tools that we use to communicate across various aspects of our digitization workflow. However, the tools would not mean anything if it were not for the hard work and collaborative spirit of the librarians throughout our consortium.

The Field Book Project (FBP) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) are pleased to bring you a joint blog series showcasing some of the best examples of digital connections between museum specimens, field book catalog records, and the resulting publications for three notable expeditions. This four part series will continue over the coming months. Ever wonder what it takes to understand the full story of historical expedition science? Read on!

Burying Members of the Franklin Expedition at Starvation Cove, c. 1924. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Science Service Records, RU 007091, Box 409, Folder 2.  2005-8639.

It’s safe to say, everyone has an idea of what an expedition is; I hope all will agree when I say they are fascinating. Expeditions can be a thrilling story of exploration, national pride, thrill-seeking, and personal drama. They have been organized for a myriad of political or personal reasons; whatever these may have been, expeditions frequently yield natural history observations and specimens. Expeditions are also a wonderful source of information about biodiversity. Since expedition participants usually come from multiple institutions and disciplines, more collecting is often possible. This can result in a specimen collection of greater breadth and variety than a typical collecting event. With these characteristics, an expedition can prove a fascinating story and an important source of scientific documentation.

So I’ve been thinking it would be interesting to look at the Field Book Project’s expedition content. FBP was inspired by the challenges a researcher experienced tracking down specimens and field books from an expedition. Those experiences helped shape the cataloging structure FBP developed. We create catalog records for field books, their collections, and their creators (persons, organizations, and expeditions). Since we started, we have cataloged field books from 103 expeditions, some involving well-known individuals or documenting the first time an area was thoroughly studied.

Theodore Roosevelt on African Expedition, 1909. Smithsonian Institution Archives, RU 00095, Box 56, Folder 10. SIA2009-1371.

On December 19th, FBP catalog records were made available through the Smithsonian’s Collection Search Center. This has created what I like to think of as the trifecta. What constitutes the trifecta? There are three major parts to natural history documentation that have proven important to researchers with whom we’ve worked: (1) the specimens, (2) the field books created when specimens were collected, and (3) the publications that resulted from their study. The Smithsonian Institution maintains online databases for many of their specimens. As BHL blog readers know, Smithsonian Libraries has also contributed to the Biodiversity Heritage Library to provide digitized versions of the publications for free access online. The FBP now offers online descriptions of the individual primary documents. The trifecta is growing for a number of Smithsonian sponsored expeditions and collecting events. A researcher now has a better chance of locating a specimen, its related field book, and a publication that cites it.

As a Field Book Project cataloger, I am thrilled to see the last element of the trifecta, our records, now available. While cataloging, we often verify information like location names by searching for digitized publications the creator may have written based on the field books. I find it fascinating to see how a publication can be informed by a primary document and vice versa. A researcher may be able to determine what a creator saw as significant about the collecting through the publication, and see the day-to-day work that the creator used to come to that conclusion in the field book.

Researching an Expedition

“At the South Pole: Oscar wisting and his team arrive at the goal” from The South Pole by Roald Amundsen, pg 121.  Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Publications resulting from expeditions also run a high risk of losing an explicit expedition connection. Book catalog records do not always indicate that a publication documents a certain expedition. A researcher looking for resulting publications might have to search for participants as authors, looking for a period of time after the expedition was completed, then read the publication itself to verify the content is relevant. Some of these issues, like discovery of expedition related publications, may seem pretty straightforward, but this type of search assumes that the researcher knows who took part in the expedition.

How expeditions are documented

Expedition documentation varies widely. In recent years, some universities and museums have used the general appeal of expeditions to highlight some of their own collections online. These can be wonderfully informative websites, but usually only cover a few expeditions of significance to the home institution.

The Smithsonian Institution, as part of its initiative to be a provider of public history, has a detailed list of Smithsonian related expeditions available as an online guide that covers 1878 – 1917, compiled from Smithsonian Annual Reports. The Institution’s annual reports have a long tradition of discussing any major fieldwork. Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA) also maintains more than 150 individual expedition records. These records are at varied levels of completeness, since Annual Reports sometimes only mention the name of a collecting effort if it was small.

Over the last two years, FBP has documented 103 expeditions relating to field notes. Several were not in the extensive list already kept by SIA, but deeply buried in personal or departmental papers. These can be rich resources, but a researcher would usually not know the information was there without reading the materials, despite the detailed finding aids SIA generates every year.

Researching an expedition is like untangling a very large knot. FBP, BHL, and museum divisions work to increase online documentation so researchers can find the right string to pull. This is by no means a finished process; many of us know what a gnarly tangle the search through materials can become. The digitization of the specimen, field book and publication trifecta can only serve to ease the burden of this twisted ravel of biology, personal history and published record, helping us and our researchers to find the connections.

Sometimes I come across items in the BHL collection that elicit an immediate response. In this case it was, “Look at all those ears!”

Ears indeed. In 1912 Johan Erik Vesti Boas published his Ohrknorpel und äusseres ohr der Säugetiere; eine vergleichend-anatomische Untersuchung (Ear cartilage and outer ear of mammals, a comparative anatomical study). Beautifully illustrated, Boas’ book takes us through a host of mammal ears from rodents, to whales, kangaroos, pigs, bats, primates, and yes, even humans. There are some very nice cartilage spreads as well which we have included in our in our Flickr photostream but for now I will show some of my favorite pinnae (outer ear) pin-ups!

Find the ear of the tiny tenrec here!

Ooh, there’s a pika ear in here!

Can you spot the capybara ear?

I cannot help but throw in a picture of a full color mammal pinna from my very own Canis lupus familiaris. If you look closely you can see the aperture, or the entrance of the ear canal, under all that hair.