All posts by Adriana Marroquin

One of the great aspects of the BHL Field Notes Project is how the field notes we are digitizing – and the naturalists who created them – have connections to multiple project partners. Edmund Heller is one of these interconnected naturalists. Heller was a naturalist active in the early twentieth century who participated in several expeditions sponsored by different institutions across the nation, including a number of BHL Field Notes Project partners.

Adriana Marroquin recently joined the BHL as the Field Notes Project Manager. This isn’t Adriana’s first time with the BHL or Smithsonian Libraries. She interned for the BHL and the Smithsonian Botany & Horticulture library after graduate school, and later worked as a library technician at the Anthropology, and American Art/Portrait Gallery libraries.

Over the past few months, I’ve been working as the Biodiversity Heritage Library Flickr Content Volunteer. As someone who really values the cross-section between art and science, it’s a fascinating task. The Flickr page is full of beautiful images of flowers, birds, and butterflies.

It’s no secret that the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a top-notch resource for legacy biodiversity publications. The current U.S. copyright law states that if a title was published over 90 years ago, that title has entered the public domain and is out of copyright. This allows the BHL to digitize and provide access to an astounding number of volumes published before 1923. However, that 1923 cut-off isn’t the end-all, be-all for BHL. An often overlooked aspect of the portal is that it provides access to several post-1922 titles.