All posts by Bianca Crowley

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. Find out more about who we are with this handy, interactive Google map: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 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!

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

For this week’s BHL Book of the Week, I’d like to highlight a book that is all about one of my favorite plant species, Humulus lupulus, better known as hops.

As Collections Coordinator for the Biodiversity Heritage Library, I am the point person for all things collections related. I lead and organize the work of the BHL Collections Committee, process all scanning requests, manage the acquisition of new materials and handle our permissions agreement workflow.

We are thrilled to announce that selected collections of BHL content are now available on the new iTunes U!

We first launched our article download functionality back in January of 2009, giving users the ability to create their own PDF of selected pages from an item in BHL. Since that time, over 79,000 articles have been created by our users. That’s an average of 80 articles created each day (thanks WolframAlpha.com)! Clearly the ability to create your own PDF of selected pages, rather than download the entire book or volume, is a useful service; something we have been working on to make improvements whenever possible.