All posts by Grace Costantino

On September 27-28, 2012, thirty-one staff members representing all 14 BHL member institutions convened at the Ernst Mayr Library at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University for the 2012 BHL Staff and Technical Meeting. As a combined meeting, it brought together not only those that manage the digitization workflow at each member institution, but also those that work to keep BHL’s technical infrastructure running smoothly and constantly improving.

In 1876, two men by the names of Frederick Godman and Osbert Salvin began work on perhaps the most comprehensive account of the flora and fauna of Mexico and Central America ever undertaken. Entitled Biologia Centrali Americana, this 63 volume work, published over the course of 36 years, relates nearly all information known at the time on the mammals, birds, fish, mollusks, insects, arachnids, and botany in the region. Accompanied by over 1,600 lithographic plates, 900 of which are colored, Biologia Centrali Americana is arguably the single most authoritative work on Mexico and Central America’s turn-of-the-century biodiversity and constitutes a perfect candidate to help us celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month!

Here in the Washington, D.C. area, where the BHL Secretariat is housed, North American wildlife is a hot topic with the grand opening of the new National Zoo American Trail exhibit. The exhibit features some of the most iconic American species, including the Bald Eagle, Gray Wolf, North American Beaver, and the Otter. We’ve been celebrating the exhibit all week on Twitter and Facebook, and we thought it only natural to further commemorate American fauna with our book of the week. To do so, we’ve selected Wild Animals of North America (1918), contributed by the American Museum of Natural History.