Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL
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The Raptor Research Foundation

View Full Size ImageThis year, the Raptor Research Foundation (RRF) celebrates its 50th year of promoting scientific understanding of birds of prey. Last month, the RRF gave BHL permission to add its newsletter and the first 38 years of its journal to the collection—a wealth of information about hawks, eagles, falcons, owls, and their relatives—as part of the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL) project. 

History

 
Following a precipitous decline in the population of Peregrine Falcons in the mid-1960s, and before the effects of agricultural chemicals like DDT were well understood, experts identified a correlation between the crisis and an increase in cereal farming in Great Britain. A handful of those experts convened to tackle the problem, and thus was born the Raptor Research Foundation in February of 1966. 
 
In the years since its founding, the RRF has gained a robust international membership and expanded its scope to cover all aspects of raptor science. Writing to commemorate the RRF’s 50th anniversary in the March, 2016 issue of the Journal of Raptor Research (v.50, no.1), W. Grainger Hunt—one of RRF’s original members—notes that the Foundation’s early activities all progressed to “a satisfying endpoint—from field biology to chemistry and physiology, from experimentation to population ecology and advocacy, and ultimately, to restoration.” He goes on to mention several important contributions of RRF members, including the discovery that the drug diclofenac was responsible for decimating Asian vulture populations. 

Today, the RRF remains at the forefront of raptor conservation, harnessing the power of volunteers to address the myriad threats to raptor populations around the world: its Conservation Committee releases Position Statements that engage, challenge, and influence policymakers; its annual conference is a gathering place for the raptor community to present original research and participate in training workshops; and its publications disseminate the latest findings in raptor science to the broader scientific community. 

Publications

 
The journal of the RRF began publication in 1967 as Raptor Research News, which doubled as an organizational newsletter and a vehicle for scholarship. Starting with volume 6 in 1972, the title was shortened to Raptor Research, which reflected its broader scope. It was also organized into three sections: formal, peer-reviewed Scientific Papers; Reports, Reviews, and Opinion, which contained meeting reports, book reviews, and other secondary material receiving less editorial scrutiny; and Notes, News, and Queries, which contained items typically found in a newsletter. 
 
Beginning with volume 21 in 1987, the journal was renamed The Journal of Raptor Research, its current title. Like the preceding title, it is published quarterly and organized into Research Articles, Short Communications, and Letters, followed by secondary material such as book reviews. Within the next several weeks, The Journal of Raptor Research will be available on BHL through volume 39 (2005). 
 
In 1992, recognizing the need for a separate publication that was less labor-intensive than the journal and more appropriate for informal news items relevant to the raptor community, the RRF established a newsletter called Wingspan. Wingspan is published twice a year and contains news about Foundation leadership and elections, member profiles, conference summaries, short features about individuals and organizations involved in raptor conservation, and other brief news items. Or, as then-president Richard J. Clark summarized in his introduction to the first issue of Wingspan in 1992, “Journal articles tend to be more about raptors and Newsletter articles about raptor people.” Look for additional issues of Wingspan in BHL in the coming weeks.

The EABL staff is grateful to the RRF for so generously allowing its publications to appear in BHL, and we wish them success in their ongoing efforts to promote understanding and conservation of raptors.
August 18, 2016by [email protected]
Blog Reel, Featured Books

The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society

The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS) is a nonprofit organization based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that offers a variety of gardening programs and activities to its members as well as the surrounding city and state. Its annual Philadelphia Flower Show is the largest and longest-running event of its kind, attracting florists, gardeners, and landscape designers from all over the world. The PHS has also produced many publications over the years, some of which are now available in BHL through the IMLS grant Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL).

History of the PHS

Founded in 1827 with 80 members, the PHS provided a forum for serious growers interested in horticulture and its various applications, commercial and academic. At monthly meetings, members exhibited rare or unusual plants, discussed innovations in horticulture, tasted wine, and distributed among themselves cuttings and grafts of plants from all over the U.S. The PHS began a small library in 1828, and the following year held its first annual Philadelphia Flower Show.
Over the next several decades, many prominent seedsmen–some of them PHS members–exhibited at the Philadelphia Flower Show, including Henry Dreer, Robert Buist, Josiah Coates, and David Landreth. These men owned successful nurseries, and many of their catalogs can be found in BHL’s Seed & Nursery Catalogs collection.
By 1842, the PHS library contained 450 volumes. It was expanded, and a librarian hired at a salary of $50 per year. By 1850, the library had doubled in size, becoming one of the largest horticultural collections in the country. In 1854, it narrowly avoided destruction in a fire that claimed the Philadelphia Museum.
Around this time, the PHS began making recommendation to the Philadelphia City Council on which trees to eliminate and which to cultivate in public parks. This marked the beginning of PHS’s longstanding efforts to bring gardening to urban spaces, efforts which continued in the decade preceding the Civil War, despite a decline in the Society’s membership and finances.
While its finances were still precarious after the Civil War, the PHS enjoyed increased membership, and in 1867 built its first Horticultural Hall. The more famous Horticultural Hall was built in Fairmount Park for the Centennial Exposition of 1876; PHS members actively contributed to the planning and execution of the Centennial, and the event afforded its members the opportunity to display their fruits and flowers. After the Centennial, PHS held its annual flower show in the new hall. The original hall was damaged in a fire in early 1881 and rebuilt later that year; it was completely destroyed by a second fire in 1893. A third hall was built in 1896, which was sold in 1917 in a time of financial hardship.

The 20th century saw the PHS shift to a predominantly amateur membership, which continued to grow with each passing decade. During World War 2, its members were involved in the movement to plant “victory gardens” which could sustain families during a time of scarcity. Writing in the 1945 Yearbook of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, the Report of the President for the previous year asserted:

I feel we should all take pride in the condition of the Society, especially in the face of the changing economic conditions that have been brought about by the war. A planned economy, with all of its regimentation, has been forced upon us for the duration of the Second World War, and the end is not yet. Our important duty has been to keep alive human interest in the work of our Creator as we find it in plant life, which is the very sustenance of our existence. Horticulture, in truth, is refined from agriculture to fit the home and becomes the basis of its economy, from which our community and national economy and life are but mammoth developments.

By the second half of the 20th century, the amateur-oriented activities of the PHS were clearly reflected in its publications, such as a members’ newsletter that offered gardening tips, brief articles, and book recommendations. Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Flower Show continued to grow in size and prominence.

The PHS Today

Currently, the PHS boasts a membership of 27,000. The Philadelphia Flower Show continues to be a major event every year, and in keeping with its early activities, the PHS remains heavily involved in creating civic landscapes, improving public parks, and planting community gardens in Philadelphia.

The PHS McLean Library contains 15,000 volumes and is working to digitize many historic, public domain horticultural works as well as PHS publications. It has given BHL permission to add many of these to its own collection (where they will appear soon!), including:
  • Yearbook of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (1925-1998)
  • PHS News (v.1-38, 1960-1997)
  • Philadelphia Spring Flower Show (1966-1997) [title varies]
  • Pennsylvania Gardens (v.1-4 (1937)
  • From Seed to Flower: Philadelphia 1681-1876 (1976)
  • Bulletin of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (v.1, nos.1-2 (1923))
  • The Green Scene (v.1-42, 1972-2014)
  • A History of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, 1827-1927 (1929)
  • America’s Garden Legacy: A Taste for Pleasure (1978)

Janet Evans, Associate Director of the McLean Library, says, “We made a commitment…to contribute to digitization of horticultural material. I think it’s particularly important in horticulture, because so many of the older serials have never been well indexed, and yet they contain information that is of value to researchers today – historians, biographers, academics in the humanities as well as horticulturists.”

We are grateful to the PHS for their commitment to open access and their efforts to promote horticulture in Pennsylvania and across the world!

July 21, 2016by [email protected]
Blog Reel, Featured Books

The Roosevelt Wild Life Station

This is the first in a monthly series of posts highlighting contributions to the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL) project, which aims to enhance BHL’s collections with content from natural history libraries, societies, and other institutions across the United States.

The Roosevelt Wild Life Station (RWLS) is a research center within the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) in Syracuse, New York. Its mission is “to deliver the science and trained professionals to preserve our wildlife heritage and save imperiled species worldwide.” In the first half of the 20th century, the RWLS produced two publications—the Roosevelt Wild Life Bulletin and the Roosevelt Wild Life Annals—which are now available in BHL.

Founding of the RWLS

In December of 1916 Charles Christopher Adams, a zoologist at the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, approached Theodore Roosevelt to discuss the need for systematic study of big game and other mammals in the forests of North America. Dr. Adams believed that a lack of understanding of these animals was a problem not only for scientists, but also for industry—particularly forestry—and the economy in general. Roosevelt agreed that research in this area should be undertaken and asked Dr. Adams to devise a plan, which he outlined the following year. Despite Roosevelt’s enthusiastic approval, the work was delayed—first by the onset of World War I, and then by Roosevelt’s death on January 9, 1919.

Dr. Adams, undeterred by these events, saw a new opportunity to carry on the vision he had shared with Roosevelt, and convinced the state legislature of New York to establish the Roosevelt Wild Life Forest Experiment Station as a memorial to the former President. The Station was signed into law on May 10, 1919, as part of the New York State College of Forestry. The legislation stated that the RWLS would conduct “investigations, experiments, and research in relation to the habits, life histories, methods of propagation and management of fish, birds, game and food and fur-bearing animals and forest wild life.” Dr. Adams was the Station’s first director.

Writing in Science in June, 1919, Dr. Adams proclaimed:

“Never before in America, and for that matter, possibly, never before in the world, has there been a forest biological station devoted primarily or exclusively to the study of every phase of forest wild life. The establishment of such a station at the New York State College of Forestry, at Syracuse University, is thus an event of considerable general interest and importance, not only to those interested in the conservation of wild life, to foresters, and to zoologists in general, and particularly to field naturalists, but in addition to many others who are interested in the ecology of fish, birds, game, fur-bearing animals, and other kinds of forest wild life. This station, named in honor of the man … thus becomes a very appropriate memorial to Theodore Roosevelt.”

An editorial in the August, 1919 issue of Forest and Stream speculated that “The work that such an experiment station may do is almost limitless and its possibilities are as yet quite beyond the range of our imagination.”

The conservationist George Bird Grinnell was equally laudatory; in the foreword to the first issue of the Roosevelt Wild Life Bulletin (1921), he wrote, “No one more than Theodore Roosevelt appreciated the value of the work done and to be done by the field-naturalist. No one more than he would welcome those services to science that may be accomplished by the Experiment Station that bears his name.”

Publications of the RWLS

Under Dr. Adams’s tenure as director, the RWLS began publishing the Roosevelt Wild Life Bulletin in 1921, which ran until 1950. The Bulletin contains general and “popular interest” pieces related to forest ecology. Many of these articles describe the geography and wildlife of the forests immediately surrounding the RWLS, as well as the Adirondacks and other regions of upstate New York. Several others detail field research conducted at Camp Roosevelt, Yellowstone National Park, where Professor Alvin Whitney, of the New York State College of Forestry, ran a boys’ summer camp in the early 1920s.

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Typically, each issue of the Bulletin is organized around a single topic or group of related topics: parasites in freshwater fishes, a county-level wildlife and forest survey, and the management of ruffed grouse, among others. These articles, which treated wildlife as natural resources, would surely have interested naturalists, foresters, and hunters alike. In fact, within a few years of the RWLS’s founding, people from as far away as India began to request research on subjects as esoteric as muskrat farming.

In 1926, the RWLS began a second publication, the Roosevelt Wild Life Annals, which ran for 10 years. Whereas the Bulletin was intended for a broad audience, the Annals contain technical papers that would have been of interest to professional naturalists, particularly zoologists and botanists. Like the Bulletin, each issue is typically devoted to a single topic: the red squirrel, trout streams in Yellowstone National Park, the bank swallow, and others.

The RWLS Today

Following the publication of the last Bulletin in 1950, the RWLS entered a period of inactivity that lasted until 1999, when it was reactivated through a combination of private and state funding. Governor George Pataki and Theodore Roosevelt IV presided over the rededication. The RWLS began to support student internships at ESF’s Adirondack Ecological Center, and in 2014 the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation provided $3.4 million in funding for wildlife research and management.

Today, the RWLS focuses on the northeastern U.S. and southeastern Canada in the context of truly global issues: habitat loss and climate change. In addition to providing hands-on experience to students of wildlife science, its priorities are “protection of imperiled keystone and strongly valued species vulnerable to the impacts of rapidly changing landscapes and climate; and habitat management issues, such as maintaining effective habitat in private-land mosaics, protecting and expanding core habitat areas, and securing habitat connectivity.” In these efforts, the RWLS carries on the vision shared by Dr. Adams and Theodore Roosevelt a hundred years ago.

Reference

Adams, C. C. (1919). The Roosevelt Wild-Life Forest Experiment Station. Science, n.s. 49(1275), 533-534.

Frair, J., & Gibbs, J. P. (2011, Spring). The Roosevelt Wild Life Station: Revitalizing a forgotten conservation legacy. Fair Chase, 30-34.

National Park Service. Roosevelt Lodge, 1920. Retrieved from https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/historyculture/rooseveltlodge.htm

SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. History of the Roosevelt Wild Life Station [PDF document]. Retrieved from http://www.esf.edu/rwls/timeline.pdf

May 26, 2016by [email protected]
BHL News, Blog Reel

Expanding Access Training Workshop

On February 4-5, 2016, Smithsonian Libraries hosted staff from the New York Botanical Garden, the Museum of Comparative Zoology (Harvard University), and the Missouri Botanical Garden as part of a training workshop for the New York Botanical Garden’s IMLS-funded grant, Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature.

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The BHL Secretariat staff (Carolyn Sheffield, BHL Program Manager; Bianca Crowley, BHL Collections Manager; Grace Costantino, BHL Communications and Outreach Manager; and BHL Program Director, Martin Kalfatovic) conducted the two day workshop based on previous workshops for BHL Africa and BHL Mexico. The workshop provided an intense overview of the methodologies for partnering with institutions not currently participating in the BHL in order to add new content to BHL and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

Participating staff included:

New York Botanical Garden, LuEsther T. Mertz Library

  • Susan Fraser (Director of the NYBG LuEsther T. Mertz Library, Project Director)
  • Susan Lynch (Systems Librarian, Data Manager)
  • Mariah Lewis (Metadata Specialist – and former Smithsonian Libraries’ intern)

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Ernst Mayr Library, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University

  • Constance Rinaldo (Librarian of the Ernst Mayr Library of the MCZ/Harvard University)
  • Joe deVeer (Project Manager and Museum Liaison for the Ernst Mayr Library of the MCZ/Harvard University)
  • Patrick Randall (Community Manager)

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Missouri Botanical Garden, Center for Biodiversity Informatics

  • Trish Rose-Sandler (Digital Projects Coordinator, Center for Biodiversity Informatics, Missouri Botanical Garden and Data Analyst for BHL)

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Thanks to the staff from the Smithsonian Libraries’ Natural History Library for hosting the event in their training room.

If you would like to learn more about Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature, please visit the project’s wiki page.

February 16, 2016by [email protected]
Blog Reel, Featured Books

The Stories Seeds Tell
Since the mid-19th century, seed and nursery catalogs have reflected the agricultural and horticultural landscape of the United States. These catalogs—which began as guides to medicinal herbs, and are still printed today—often contain lists of plant varieties and gardening advice. While seed catalogs are used primarily by commercial growers and home gardeners, they also represent an invaluable resource to historians, artists, and researchers of all kinds.

So, what exactly do seed and nursery catalogs tell us?

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History

Seed catalogs offer a fascinating glimpse into the cultural, economic, and political history of the era in which they were published. For instance, when the outbreak of World War I halted agricultural exports from Europe to the US, American citizens planted their own “war gardens” to ease the strain on the food supply; seed catalogs of the time leveraged the economic climate to aid the war effort and increase their own sales. In 1918, Allen’s Book of Berries—a seed catalog specializing in strawberries—prefaced its annual publication with this admonition:
“Of one thing we are sure. We must not slacken our efforts to produce just as much as we can, for reasons of patriotism as well as of profit. Fruit is not a luxury; it is a necessity. As such, we should make that supply plentiful.”

Technology

In addition to offering varieties of seeds for sale, seed and nursery catalogs often included advertisements for the latest tools and gadgets. This technology reflected the materials available at the time as well as the gradual trend toward large-scale commercial growing and away from single-household plots. The hand-held implements of the mid-19th century catalogs gave way to the combine-like machinery of the 20th century.

Seed catalogs themselves started to change, incorporating black-and-white photography alongside traditional, brightly-colored illustrations. The widespread availability of color film in the 1940s changed the look of catalogs yet again.

Food

As the genetic landscape of our food continues to change, many people look to historical seed catalogs to understand what previous generations were eating, and what it means for GMOs and current agricultural practices. Seed catalogs are a treasure trove of information about heirloom vegetable varieties and organic gardening. As technology continues to evolve however, they face an uncertain future: does the Internet make printed seed catalogs obsolete?

The Future

Whether the Internet means the end of printed catalogs or not, it provides some new and exciting IMLS-funded Purposeful Gaming Project. Because they are printed in unconventional formats, with many tables and abbreviations, seed catalogs make poor candidates for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. This means that in order to make them searchable in BHL, individuals must transcribe their contents by hand.
opportunities to use them as part of the

The Missouri Botanical Garden, the New York Botanical Garden, and Cornell University are providing their seed catalogs to game developer Tiltfactor, which is working on a video game to help users compare and correct these difficult transcriptions. Once corrections are made, they will be incorporated into the BHL collection.

Stay tuned for how you can help transcribe seed and nursery catalogs, and look for Tiltfactor’s new game after the holidays! If you’re eager to start transcribing now, check out the diaries and journals of ornithologist William Brewster. And don’t forget to browse a century’s worth of horticultural history in the BHL’s Seed and Nursery Catalogs collection.

November 28, 2014by [email protected]
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About BHL

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”

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