All posts by eomeara

Over the course of the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL) project, contributing organizations have shipped material to Internet Archive scanning centers around the country. A few have scanned their own material, and a few more have used third-party commercial services. One EABL contributor did things a little differently.

Betsy Kruthoffer, Librarian and Rare Books Cataloger at the Lloyd Library and Museum, selected a number of important titles from the library’s collection that were not in BHL. After weighing various scanning options, she got in touch with the digital lab at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County (PLCH), which had done good work for a Lloyd patron the previous year (and, conveniently, is located right down the street). PLCH agreed to do the scanning, with the understanding that the digitized books would also be made available in a PLCH online collection.

The first quarter of 2017 saw 39 in-copyright titles added to BHL, setting the pace for another record-breaking year. New international BHL Members and Affiliates, as well as grant projects like Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature, have contributed to the growing number of recent titles in the collection, as member libraries continue to chip away at digitizing the legacy literature.

The last quarter of 2016 continued the year’s steady growth in new permissions for in-copyright titles: 46 in October, November, and December, bringing the year-end total to 154! Major drivers of this growth were the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature project, staff at BHL participating institutions, and the worldwide BHL user community, which regularly identifies material and recommends it for digitization.

The story of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History (CMNH) begins in the 1830s, when a small group of men filled a two-room wooden building in Public Square, downtown Cleveland, with mounted animals. This building was known as the “Ark,” and the men who gathered there, united in their passion for natural history, were called “Arkites.” The Arkites were led by William Case, who would later become mayor of Cleveland. He, his brother, and his father had used the Ark as a place to retreat from work, and in the absence of any other museums in the city, it became a hub for all kinds of collection and research. In 1876, the Ark was relocated to Case Hall.