How does BHL celebrate the holidays?

As a project, we work to raise awareness about the plight facing the Earth’s biodiversity today and provide ways to help preserve scientific knowledge, support research, and conserve species. As a consortium, our BHL member institutions spread some fantastic holiday cheer by featuring some exciting seasonal exhibits.

We decided to celebrate the holidays this year by taking you through a virtual tour of the seasonal exhibitions at some of our member institutions and, as an added bonus, showcase this year’s BHL “superstars” for each member. What’s a BHL “superstar,” you ask? Well, today, it’s each member’s most popular book in BHL this year. Some of them just might surprise you!

American Museum of Natural History

Did you know that a group of jellyfish is called a smack? Or that a group of kangaroos is called a mob? A group of wise owls? It’s called a parliament.

“Smack” of jellyfish (far left). Origami Art on the AMNH Holiday Tree. © AMNH/R. Mickens

© AMNH

The American Museum of Natural History has decorated its annual 13-foot tall holiday tree with origami “groups” of animals, inspired by the museum’s collections. These “groups” highlight the fact that even solitary animals spend at least some time with others of their species. The 500 delightful origami ornaments took volunteers from OrigamiUSA approximately 5 months to construct, and include groups of zebras, giraffes, and even bacteria!

The origami tree has been a hallmark of the museum’s holiday celebrations for more than 30 years and will be on display through January 6. Don’t miss your chance to experience biodiversity through paper art! How about using the over 50,000 images in the BHL Flickr to inspire your own origami art?!

The winner of the AMNH 2012 Most Popular Book? Ibis (1859), v. 1. 

Two Tyrannulets, from the Zimmerius genus. Plate 4 from v. 1, Ibis (1859)

The American Museum of Natural History has an extremely strong ornithology collection. Therefore, it’s no surprise that the most popular book contributed by this library would be one of the cornerstones of ornithological literature. Frederick Godman and Osbert Salvin, the authors of Biologia Centrali Americana – arguably the most authoritative work on Mexican and Central American biodiversity – were two of twenty ornithology enthusiasts to establish this journal, which is still published today, in 1859. Explore the illustrations of the Ibis in our past blog post.

California Academy of Sciences

Snowman Dome at CAS. © CAS

Think you won’t find much snow this Holiday Season in California? Think again! The ‘Tis the Season for Science event at the California Academy of Sciences features live reindeer, research specimens illustrating how various species cope with cold temperatures, a snowman-shaped digital dome featuring programming about the science of the seasons, and, yes, snow in the piazza every 30 minutes!

Live reindeer at CAS! © CAS

Some interesting tidbits from CAS: Did you know that the reindeer is the only deer species in which both males and females exhibit antlers? Did you know that species deal with harsh winters, generally, by adopting 1 of 2 strategies: heading south or hibernating? Perplexed by the bi-hourly snow falling at CAS? It’s temperature-resistant and biodegradable!

The CAS Holiday Exhibit ‘Tis the Season for Science will be open through January 6. Don’t miss your chance to experience polar bears, geese, reindeer, and snow in California! In honor of the CAS caribou attraction, enjoy this Reindeer Holiday Greeting Card from BHL!

Excerpt from the Rollo Beck Galapagos expedition journal.

The most popular book from the California Academy of Sciences this year? The Rollo Beck Galapagos Expedition Journal!

The Rollo Beck Journal was the first field notebook to be ingested into BHL. As part of the IMLS Connecting Content project, CAS is digitizing field notebooks (essentially the scientific journals kept by researchers while on expeditions and/or performing field work) in its collection. This journal gives a broad overview of the 1905-06 expedition to the Galapagos, led by Rollo H. Beck. An interesting highlight from this journal? It includes a passage relating the first news Beck received of the 1906 fire that destroyed nearly all of CAS’s collections. Learn more about the journal and the Connecting Content grant in this past blog post.

Fairy Tale Cottage at MOBOT’s Gardenland Express. © MOBOT

It’s a holiday wonderland in St. Louis this year with the Gardenland Express! Staff and volunteers have transformed the Garden’s Orthwein Floral Display Hall into a whimsical fantasy complete with a fairy tale cottage, 900 feet of miniature train tracks, and a stunning array of traditional holiday plants. The exhibit, celebrating “Merry Botanical Traditions,” took years to plan and even features silk poinsettia, holly, and Christmas Cactus constructed by artisans from the Garden’s previous Lantern Festival.

Find out what it takes to transform a barren room into a holiday treat in the video below. If you’re in St. Louis anytime before January 1, don’t miss your chance to experience the wonder for yourself! Maybe you can use our botanical illustrations to identify some of the plants featured in the exhibit!

This year, the MOBOT “Superstar” award goes to…..Systema Naturae (1758), v. 1, 10th Ed., by Carl Linnaeus.

The first description of a lion in the 10th Ed. of Systema Naturae, with an illustration of a lion in Brehm’s Life of Animals.

It’s probably not very surprising that the publication that marked the beginning of zoological nomenclature is the 2012 most popular book contributed by the Missouri Botanical Garden. But did you know that, though Linnaeus’ first edition of Species Plantarum and this tenth edition of Systema Naturae are heralded as the starting points of binomial nomenclature for botany and zoology, respectively, the concept for the system was partially developed by Gaspard and Johann Bauhin in the late 1500s? Learn more about Linnaeus, Species Plantarum and Systema Naturae in our previous blog post.

It’s all about the trains this year for BHL’s botanical partners! Celebrating the season with the Holiday Train Show, the New York Botanical Garden has laid a quarter of a mile of miniature train tracks throughout a lush botanical backdrop populated by reconstructions of 140 of New York’s famous landmarks. The best part? These reconstructions, the products of Applied Imagination, are crafted using natural materials like bark, twigs, fruit, seeds, and stems!

What delightful icons will visitors to the seasonally-converted Enid A. Haupt Conservatory at NYBG encounter? To name just a few: Yankee Stadium, New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Bridge, and, new this year, the Macy’s location made famous by “A Miracle on 34th Street.” The Artists’ Studio, part of the exhibit, gives visitors a behind-the-scenes view of how these marvelous buildings are constructed, as well as a chance to experience some international icons, including the Sphinx and Parthenon.

Have kids? Then NYBG’s Gingerbread Adventures, which gives children a chance to play inside a life-size gingerbread house and decorate gingersnaps, is right up your alley!

The Holiday Train Show runs through January 13. Don’t miss your chance to experience New York with botanical eyes!

The most popular book this year contributed by NYBG? Again in the spirit of BHL botanical institutions, it’s v.1, pt.1 of the 11th edition of Systema Naturae (1760). The next twelfth edition, the last published under Linnaeus’ authorship, was comprised of 2,400 pages, expanded from the original eleven pages of the first edition (published in 1735).

ZooLights Entrance. See more ZooLights Images. © SI.

Every year, the Smithsonian’s National Zoo lights up the dark winter nights with thousands of Christmas lights strung together to form animal silhouettes. This year is no exception, with more than 500,000 environmentally-friendly LED lights depicting dozens of dazzling species. Free to the public, the ZooLights event runs until January 1 on select days. Don’t miss this opportunity to see a mamma and baby panda, brown kiwi, elephants, a python, a lion, and even a cow like you’ve never seen them before!

And not to spoil the train theme, the National Zoo is also featuring a farm-themed miniature train at the Visitor Center.

Farm-Themed Train at National Zoo Visitor Center. © SI.

The most popular book contributed to BHL by the Smithsonian Libraries also happens to be the most popular item in BHL. What is it? Taxonomic Literature (1976), v. 1.

Charles Darwin in TL2. Specimen from Cambridge University Herbarium collected by Darwin on Beagle Voyage.

More commonly known as TL2, Taxonomic Literature: a selective guide to botanical publications and collections with dates, commentaries and types “provides the most comprehensive biographical and bibliographical analysis for systematic botany literature published between 1753 and 1940.” In all, TL2 is comprised of 15 volumes, organized by author name. The volumes represent an extensive list of botanists who have published botanical literature between 1753 and 1940. Each entry provides a short biography of the author, the location of any specimens they may have collected, a list of publications that author has published, and, based on analysis of more than 100 library collections, information about which libraries may hold a copy of each publication.

The Smithsonian Libraries’ online TL2 project indexes corrected OCR for the TL2 volumes scanned for BHL to provide additional search and analysis functionality, including author, author name abbreviation, and title abbreviation search support.

We hope you get a chance to visit one of the exceptional Holiday Exhibits at our BHL member institutions.  From all of us here at BHL, we wish you very Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays from BHL! Find this and other Holiday Greeting Cards on Pinterest.

Preserving Biodiversity Knowledge and Strengthening Conservation Efforts

The Extinct Carolina Parakeet. Captured by Mark Catesby.

In 1918, the last known surviving Carolina Parakeet, the only parrot species native to the eastern United States, died. While museum specimens may help us retain some information about this species, for many others, everything we know is contained in a single description found within a hard to find book or article. While there is nothing we can do to bring these extinct species back, we can preserve our knowledge of them to help avoid future extinctions.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), in its global efforts to digitize biodiversity literature and make it freely available to the world, ensures that the knowledge needed to identify species, facilitate further scientific research, and support conservation efforts is available to everyone, everywhere. Thanks in part to donations from users like you, BHL currently provides access to nearly 40 million pages and over 50,000 images.

Celebrating the BHL-Africa via Travel Posters!

In 2012, BHL significantly advanced the breadth and depth of its collections and the opportunities to engage with its digitized resources. BHL added over 12,000 items and over 3.7 million pages to its collections this year, supported in part by the addition of two new members to the BHL consortium: the United States Geological Survey and Cornell University. Furthermore, BHL continued to serve new and widespread audiences by establishing a greater presence across social media channels, resulting in over 30,000 new images in Flickr this year; biodiversity facts, history, and trivia communicated via Tweets, Blog and Facebook posts; and downloads through iTunes U, all free to the public. BHL continues to expand globally, as evidenced by the June, 2012, BHL meeting in Cape Town, South Africa, designed to support the development of a BHL-Africa.

The most rewarding measure of BHL’s successes comes from the frequent testimonials received from users:

“The BHL website is an extremely valuable resource and is crucial to my research.”

“Being in a small town in Africa made accessing literature especially difficult, but I no longer feel so disadvantaged with the advent of BHL.”

“BHL makes my research so much easier! I absolutely love it. A million times thank you!”

 
The BHL’s substantial growth and activity has been supported by our dedicated patrons whose gifts we depend on to fund the digitization of additional texts, technical development for the program, and improvement of data curation. This holiday season, as you continue to seek the perfect gift for your loved ones, consider giving a gift to the planet by supporting scientific research and conservation efforts across the globe through a tax-deductible donation to the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

As a gift from our BHL family to yours, enjoy these BHL Holiday Greeting Cards and Travel Posters! Download them for free from the BHL Pinterest. Happy Holidays!

He has been praised as “saving the American soul from total surrender to materialism.” Remembered as the Father of the National Parks, he was instrumental in establishing the Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks. He founded the Sierra Club, one of the largest and most influential conservation organizations in the United States. Though born in Scotland, he is acclaimed as “one of the patron saints of twentieth-century American environmental activity.” His travel notes, amassed within the publication Travels in Alaska, represent an extremelyheartfelt account of the Alaskan frontier. He is none other than John Muir, one of the most important nature advocates America has ever known.

A Personal Journey Towards American Preservation

John Muir

Born in Dunbar, East Lothian, Scotland, in 1838, Muir moved to Wisconsin with his family in 1849. Just before his 29th birthday, following an accident in a sawmill that nearly cost him his sight, Muir embraced his true calling in life – the study and conservation of nature. That same year, Muir embarked on his first wild adventure – a 1,000 mile walk from Indiana to Florida, documented in his book A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf. However, it was his subsequent trip to California that sparked the true passion of Muir’s career – the untamed beauty of the American mountain wilderness.

In March, 1868, Muir had his first encounter with Yosemite, an experience that shaped the rest of his life. On seeing the rugged peaks of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Muir exclaimed, “No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite…The grandest of all special temples of nature.” Muir spent the rest of his years in the shadows of mountainous peaks, devoting his life to studying nature and raising awareness about the implications of human activities. He formed relationships with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Roosevelt and Louis Agassiz. He worked diligently to limit grazing activities in Yosemite, which eventually led to the introduction of a bill that established Yosemite as a national park. His assertion, backed by Louis Agassiz, that the valley in Yosemite was the result of glacial activity, not, as was formerly purported, an earthquake, helped establish his name in the scientific community.

Preservation, not Conservation

Though known for his conservation work, Muir identified himself as a preservationist, rather than a conservationist. The distinction resulted from a fall-out with his former friend, Gifford Pinchot. Pinchot, a renowned conservationist, focused on managing natural resources for sustainable commercial use. Muir ardently opposed this view, believing that nature should be preserved in-tact, not managed for human consumption. To Muir, nature was a spiritual experience, not one to be exploited.

Celebrating American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month with Muir

Muir visited Alaska for the first time in 1879. He returned to “nature’s last frontier” repeatedly over the next 30+ years of his life, amassing a mountain of notes on his travels. His study of Alaskan glaciers was instrumental in the development of theories on landscape formation via glacial activity. Muir viewed the native people of Alaska and their reverential relationship with the Earth as an inspirational example of co-dependency with nature. He spent the last months of his life aggregating his notes into his book Travels in Alaska, which was completed posthumously by Marion Randall Parsons. In celebration of National American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month, we highlight this tender account of one man’s journeys through the Alaskan wilderness.

 The Glaciers that Move Mountains

Muir Glacier in Glacier Bay

Glacier Bay covers 1,375 square miles, and the Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve represents the largest UNESCO protected biosphere in the world. Muir first encountered Glacier Bay during his first trip to Alaska. Long-interested in the impact of glacial activity on landmasses, Muir was eager to validate Agassiz’s earlier theory that much of the earth had once been covered by glaciers, and that their movement and retreat was responsible for many of the land features we see today. On a brisk Sunday morning, venturing out from his camp alone and burdened by damp clothes and tired limbs, Muir climbed 1,500 feet to catch his first glimpse of Glacier Bay:

“This was my first general view of Glacier Bay, a solitude of ice and snow and newborn rocks, dim, dreary, mysterious. I held the ground I had so dearly won for an hour or two, sheltering myself from the blast as best I could, while with benumbed fingers I sketched what I could see of the landscape, and wrote a few lines in my notebook. Then, breasting the snow again, crossing the shifting avalanche slopes and torrents, I reached camp about dark, wet and weary and glad.”

At the time of his first visit, the Bay was 44 miles from the sea. Muir returned to the Bay in 1899 with the Harriman Alaskan Expedition. This trip was instrumental in documenting the extreme retreat of the Bay, which now stands at 65 miles from the sea. This represents the fastest documented glacial retreat in history.

Alaska Through Native Eyes

Totem Pole at Stickeen Village

During his voyages through Alaska, Muir encountered many of the indigenous people of the land – namely, the Thlinkit (Tlingit) tribes. The Tlingit people have occupied the Alaskan territory for approximately 10,000 years. Muir wrote that the Tlingit people were compassionate and honorable, validating this assertion with a recount of the valor of one of their chiefs. 20-30 years before Muir’s arrival, a war ensued between a Tlingit tribe and the Sitka tribe. The fighting lasted through the summer months, preventing any tribal members from gathering food supplies for the winter. As the cold months approached, it became apparent that the tribes would starve if the fighting did not cease.

“At this crisis one of the Stickeen chiefs came out of his block-house fort into an open space midway between their fortified camps, and shouted that he wished to speak to the leader of the Sitkas.

When the Sitka chief appeared he said: ‘My people are hungry. They dare not go to the salmon-streams or berry-fields for winter supplies, and if this war goes on much longer most of my people will die of hunger. We have fought long enough; let us make peace. You brave Sitka warriors go home, and we will go home, and we will all set out to dry salmon and berries before it is too late.’

The Sitka chief replied: ‘You may well say let us stop fighting, when you have had the best of it. You have killed ten more of my tribe than we have killed of yours. Give us ten Stickeen men to balance our blood-account; then, and not till then, we will make peace and go home.’

‘Very well,’ replied the Stickeen chief, ‘You know my rank. You know that I am worth ten common men and more. Take me and make peace.’

This noble offer was promptly accepted; the Stickeen chief stepped forward and was shot down in sight of the fighting bands. Peace was thus established, and all made haste to their homes and ordinary work. That chief literally gave himself a sacrifice for his people. He died that they might live.”

Native Alaskans in Canoes near Wrangell Island

Over the course of his visits to Alaska, Muir established a friendship with a member of the Stickeen tribe named Toyatte. Killed trying to bring peace in a feud between his and a neighboring tribe, Muir wrote at his death, “Thus died for his people the noblest old Roman of them all.” Of Toyatte, Muir revealed,

He often deplored the fact that he had no son to take his name at his death, and expressed himself very grateful when I told him that his name would not be forgotten, – that I had named one of the Stickeen glaciers for him.

A Legacy Not Forgotten

John Muir died of pneumonia at age 76. His legacy, however, remains in the parks he tirelessly worked to preserve, in the 12 books and over 300 articles he penned, in his captivating accounts of the Alaskan wilderness, and through the Sierra Club, which to this day works to continue the cause Muir dedicated his life to achieving – the humble appreciation and passionate enjoyment of nature. And today, as such a man would have desired, Muir slumbers “among trees planted by his own hand.”

We hope you enjoyed this post. Interested in guest-blogging for BHL? We’d love that! Natural history, biodiversity and conservation topics are especially welcomed. Email us your ideas at[email protected]