All posts by jwinberry

Over the past few weeks, we here at the Biodiversity Heritage Library have been hard at work developing a user (that’s you!) survey. We’d like to know more about what you like about us, naturally, but we also need to know what you don’t like. As you may already be aware, the BHL is a work in progress. As such, we need your input to help guide the progression of our work over the next few years. We humbly request your assistance in responding to the BHL Survey 2010. This survey is a key component in our continuing efforts to build a library which is responsive to and serves the needs of our user communities (again, that’s you!). We can’t emphasize enough the value we place on your responses and ideas. They are sincerely appreciated and vital to further development.

The United Nations has been marking years for special observation since 1959. Since then, international relief agencies have rallied around Human Rights (1968), Apartheid (1978/79), Literacy (1994), and other issues that pose a global threat to sustained peace and prosperity. This year, the United Nations has named 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity. The message is pretty simple. Individual lives are dependent on a healthy network of life. Human activity in the form of industry and commerce poses a threat to the health of that network.

Apart from the morbid coincidence of dying in the same year–1895–there’s not a whole lot binding these two scientific luminaries together. Minerals and volcanoes on one hand and entomology and horticulture on the other. But, the world is small and the sub-world of scientific publishing even smaller, so onward, ho!

Today’s book of the week comes to us from an entomologist who also enjoyed a brief stint as a librarian. British beetles transferred from Curtis’s British entomology by Edward Wesley Janson exemplifies intellectual collaboration within the entomological community during the 19th century, when bug-collecting enjoyed heightened popularity among the general public.

A few weeks ago, we asked you what kind of posts you’d like to see more of here on the BHL blog. The landslide victor–with 9 votes!–is more posts about how researchers are currently using the resources available through BHL. So, meet Kevin de Queiroz. He’s a Research Zoologist working in the Smithsonian’s’ Department of Vertebrate Zoology, Amphibians and Reptiles Division. His current research centers on the phylogenetic relationships of various groups of lizards.