Continuing with our new series on our users and their interaction with BHL, this week we feature Dr. Charlotte Sleigh, Senior Lecturer in History of Science, University of Kent (UK), which we present in a typical question and answer interview style. So without further ado, meet Dr. Sleigh, and read what she has to say about how BHL has impacted her work, and what she would like to see from BHL in the future.

Q: What is your particular area of interest/study?

A: Historian of science with a special interest in natural history.

Q: How long have you been in your field of study?

A: 12 years

Q: When did you first discover BHL?

A: About a year ago.

Q: What is your opinion of BHL and how has it impacted your research?

A: BHL makes many old, rare or hard-to-access science and natural history texts available at the click of a mouse. In the past, if I was not sure whether or not a book was relevant to my research, I would have to make a trip to London or other major archive, and seek it out, perhaps spending a whole day only to find it was not relevant. Now I can check quickly and easily online, flicking through texts. Nine times out of ten I can get what I want from relevant texts by reading online; sometimes I supplement this by looking at another copy or edition in the flesh. Even in this latter case, however, reading online first (and re-checking afterwards) is an integral part of the research. My research has been enhanced in that I am quickly able to cross-reference the work of many scientists and naturalists against one another.

Q: How often do you use BHL?

A: It depends on whether I am in a research-intensive phase; if so, maybe average 2-4 texts per week.

Q: How do you usually use BHL (downloading whole PDFs/reading online/selecting pages to download/etc.)?

A: Read online. I also go to the text-only version at archive.org to search the text for key words, then go back to read the relevant pages at BHL online.

Q: What are your favorite features/services on BHL?

A: As above, the ability to search for key words, though this is a bit of a clunky, multi-stage process.

Q: If you could change one thing about BHL, what would it be, or what developmental aspect would you like the BHL team to focus on next?

A:

• Easier access to text-only version.
• My browser (Explorer) sometimes struggles with magnification and gets stuck on a super-enlarged corner of the page.
• Search facility can be a bit hit and miss.
• Otherwise – I would just like to see more titles continuing to be added!

Thank you, Dr. Sleigh, for taking the time to tell us about your experience with BHL. At BHL, we particularly appreciate honest feedback about how we can best focus our resources for further development. The best way to determine this is, of course, to ask those who use our services. So, if you have suggestions on how to improve BHL, or if you would like to be featured in our BHL User series on this blog, let us know via our feedback form, send a tweet to @BioDivLibrary, or post on our Facebook wall. We look forward to hearing from our user community, and also to future opportunities to feature our users.

It’s one of the most frequently downloaded books from BHL. It was compiled over thirty years, in twelve volumes, and contains 794 copper plate engravings. It depicts and describes the flora of Asia and the tropics, focusing on the medicinal properties of the flora in the Indian state of Kerala. Species names are recorded in such languages as Konkani, Arabic, Malayalam, and Latin. It contains the type illustrations of many species, and was first published in Amsterdam in 1678-1693. Edited by nearly a hundred physicians, professors of medicine and botany, amateur botanists, technicians, illustrators, engravers, officials and clergymen, the work was conceived of by the then-governor of the Dutch administration in Kochi, Hendrik van Rheede.

Enough talk! What is it, you ask?

Answer: Hortus Indicus Malabaricus, one of the most important early works on the medicinal properties of various flora.

Hortus Indicus Malabaricus has also been the recent focus of a special publication of Samagra, a journal published by the Centre for Research in Indigenous Knowledge, Science and Culture. This special issue discusses the recent discovery of the previously unidentified creator of the first volume’s Frontispiece (now identified as the Dutch Golden Age artist Gerard de Lairesse), a discussion of the contributions of the Hungarian Theologians involved with the work, as well as an analysis on the medicinal plants described within the work.

Spend some time exploring one of the most popular works in BHL, and read what modern-day researchers are still discovering about the work in the special issue of Samagra, entitled, appropriately, “Hortus Malabaricus: Special Issue.” The exotic East and its flora await you!

Here at BHL, we want to do a better job of connecting with our users. We want to interact with you, know what you think, what you would like to see, and have you contribute to the biodiversity conversation that shapes the development and progress of the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The recent debut of our new series on this blog, focusing on our users and how they use BHL for their work, is an example of our passion to get to know you, our users, more, and interact in new ways with you. However, the blog is not the only way we hope to accomplish this.

One method by which we converse and interact with our users is through our feedback form on BHL. This feedback form allows you, our user, to not only communicate with us about problems you’ve encountered or questions you might have, but, with the implementation of a specific request a title for scanning form last summer, 2010, it also allows our user community to actively participate in our collection development, ensuring that our resources are spent scanning the content our users truly need. Indeed, this feature has been a runaway success. Since the introduction of the request a title feature, BHL has received almost 900 requests for scanning. While our queue is long, and it will take a while to complete all of these requests, we are thrilled that our users are interacting with us in this way and helping us make sure that we focus our efforts and resources in the places that most need them.

We’ve increased our activity on Twitter and Facebook as well, striving to spark interesting dialogues about biodiversity, literature, and the brave new world (well, not quite so new anymore) of mass digitization. While we hope that this increased effort is useful and engaging for our users, from our perspective, it’s already paid off. Last week, we reached our goal of attaining 500 followers on Twitter (thanks, Ms. Brenner, for being our 500th follower!). For our next goal, we’re reaching high: 1000 followers. Pass this along to anyone you know who might be interested in conversing about the biodiversity literature field and assisting in our mission to serve up as much biodiversity literature as possible in an open access environment for the benefit of the world at large.

And if you have something to say about BHL, biodiversity, mass digitization, or any related topic, let us know. Comment on this blog, sent us a tweet to @BioDivLibrary, or post on our Facebook page. We’re listening, and we’re waiting!

We at BHL are anxious to find out how our collection and services affect the work of our users at an individual level. With this aspiration in mind, this week we begin a series, BHL and our Users, featuring our users and their testimonials regarding BHL’s impact on their lives and work. So, without further ado, meet Patrick Ives LaFollette, Research Associate in Malacology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, and read what he has to say about how BHL has changed the way he works.

For this week’s book of the week, we highlight an eight volume title, Flore pittoresque et médicale des Antilles, ou, Histoire naturelle des plantes usuelles des colonies françaises, anglaises, espagnoles et portugaise (1821-1829), by Michel Étienne Descourtilz. The stunning illustrations in this work were completed by Descourtilz’s son, Jean Théodore Descourtilz. This work is the first that Jean Théodore Descourtilz was known to have illustrated.

Michel Étienne Descourtilz was born November 25, 1775. A French physician, botanist, and historiographer, Descourtilz spent the years from 1799-1803 in Haiti, where he remained during the Haitian revolution. The plant collections that comprised his studies for this work were collected mostly between Port-au-Prince and Cap Haitien. Unfortunately, his natural history collections, as well as many of his drawings, were destroyed during the revolution. After returning to Paris in 1803, Descourtilz served as a physician at a hospital in Beaumont, and went on to serve as the president of the Paris Linnean society.

For this work, Descourtilz originally focused on the medicinal properties of the plants collected and presented. Descourtilz, in fact, arranged the plants in this work according to the medicinal properties as he ascertained them. However, Descourtilz eventually decided to include plants displaying commercial potential. The resulting work, with the “variety of tropical flora,” and its 600 plates, “has become, overwhelmingly, a celebration of the beauty of the flora of the area.” In 2002, a second edition set of this work sold at Christie’s auction house for $17,925 (and you can look at it, and even print it, if you want, for free!).

This week’s book of the week,Flore pittoresque et médicale des Antilles, ou, Histoire naturelle des plantes usuelles des colonies françaises, anglaises, espagnoles et portugaise (1821-1829), by Michel Étienne Descourtilz, was contributed by the New York Botanical Garden.

Happy Chinese New Year!

Today, February 3rd, 2011, is the start of the Year of the Rabbit, also called Xin Mao. By the Chinese calendar, it is also the year 4708.

In honor of the Year of the Rabbit, this week we highlight The Rabbit (1898), by James Edmund Harting, and present some interesting facts gleaned from this work regarding our furry friends.

Did you Know:

Rabbits derived their names from the burrows they form.

The name rabbit, anciently
“rabbet,” was originally applied only to the young, and the adults were refered to as “Coney.”

The main structural differences between a rabbit and a hare are
apparent in the skull and the length of the ears and hind limbs, which are much shorter in the rabbit than in the hare.

A rabbit seeks safety by hiding in a burrow, whereas a hare seeks safety in flight. The length of the hind legs of the hare give it the advantage in flight, while the shorter limbs of the rabbit are useful for throwing out soil when burrowing and thumping the ground to sound an alarm to those underground in a burrow.

The white under-surface of the tail on a rabbit is used to give an alarm to other rabbits as a sort of “white flag” when danger is near.

Rabbit young are born underground and are blind, whereas the young of hares are born above ground with eyes open.

Wild rabbits begin to reproduce at six months, and have half a dozen litters in a year. The period of gestation is twenty-eight days and there are generally five to seven young in a litter.

The average weight of a wild rabbit is 3-3 1/2 pounds.

Take a look at our book of the week for more fascinating facts about the rabbit, and don’t forget to have a little celebration for the Chinese New Year and the Year of the Rabbit!

This week’s book of the week, The Rabbit (1898), by James Edmund Harting, was contributed by the American Museum of Natural History.

So, you’ve got an iPad or another eBook reader, and you’re thinking, “BHL was just made for this!” It can be a little tricky to determine how best to use BHL on your reader or iPad, so we thought we’d take a few minutes to publish some tips that might help. So…

First off, you always have the option to simply download the PDF from BHL and view your content that way. If you’re using an iPad or iPod Touch, you’ll need an application that will let you read these PDFs, such as GoodReader. If you go to the BHL website and choose the option to download the PDF on your iPad, your iPad should then give you the option to open the PDF with any one of the eBook reader applications you have installed.

Unfortunately, there is a drawback to viewing BHL downloaded content as PDFs on your eReader device. Depending on the size of the PDF, it may take some time for the pages to render. Thus, you might have to be somewhat patient when viewing your PDF.

If you do not want to mess with the loading time involved in PDF viewing, you can download an eBook version of the item first and then use one of your eReader applications, such as iBooks, to view it. To download one of these eReader-friendly files, find the item you want to download in BHL, click on the “Download/About this Book” drop down menu on the page turner screen, and choose the option “View at Internet Archive.”

Once you are on the Internet Archive site, on the left-hand side of the screen, beneath the thumbnail view of the item, you will see a variety of download options, including ePub and a download for Kindle. Simply choose the eBook friendly file type you want to download. If you downloaded it while on your iPad, your iPad will then give you the option to choose which eReader application you want to use to view the file. If you download it on your computer, you will simply need to transfer the file to whichever eReading device you are using. If you are using an iPad and you download on your computer, simply add the eBook to your iTunes account and sync your iPad with your iTunes.

There is one thing to keep in mind with any eBook-type files you may download. These files are dependent on the quality of the OCR text associated with the item. Thus, due to the limitations of the technology, you may find that there are some strange characters or misspellings throughout your eBook. As OCR technology continues to improve, these kinds of issues will become much less apparent. However, for now, we are at the mercy of the technology.

Hopefully this information will prove helpful to any of our users braving the new frontier of eReaders. Please feel free to send us any questions or comments you might have, or tell us how you are using eReaders to access BHL content by commenting on this post. Happy eReading!