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Featured Books
    All Featured Books
    Book of the Month Series
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  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
  • User Stories
  • Campaigns
    • Fossil Stories
    • Garden Stories
    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
  • Tech Blog
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Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts by Matthew Person

Blog Reel, Featured Books

The Last Heath Hen, and Other News From the Collecting Net In Woods Hole

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“On Martha’s Vineyard Island just across the Sound from the Marine Biological Laboratory is the home of the lone survivor of the Heath Hen. The death of this individual will also mean the death of its race, and then another bird will have taken its place among the endless array of extinct forms. The numbers of Heath Hen have been closely followed by ornithologists and since 1908 a detailed census has been taken of the birds each year. For the first time in the history of ornithology a species has been studied and photographed in its normal environment down to the very last individual.”

-Professor Alfred O Gross, Bowdoin College, as written in The Collecting Net: Volume 5, Number 3, 12 July 1930.

We came across a unique article, “The Last Heath Hen,” in the Biodiversity Heritage Library recently. The article from The Collecting Net newspaper is a beautifully-crafted account from 1930 of the then-last stand and near extinction of the last animal of the ground-feeding Heath Hen species (Tympanuchus cupido cupido), a member of the grouse family and subspecies of the Prairie Chicken. This species once ranged from Maine to the Carolinas in American colonial times and before but was all but extinct on the US mainland by 1870, except for it holding its own in the scrub brush, open fields, and low pine forests of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

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April 29, 2021byMatthew Person
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Researching the American Horseshoe Crab: Connecting 19th and 21st Century Research with the MBLWHOI Library

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The venerable science journal the Biological Bulletin has been published in association with the Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Hole, Massachusetts for over 130 years. Presently, the publisher is the University of Chicago Press, with the editorial office in Woods Hole managed by longtime Editor, Carol Schachinger.

The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) was founded in 1888 through the diligent efforts of working scientists and Boston community leaders deeply invested in the marine and associated biological sciences as a tools to conduct research and develop diverse educational opportunities for the study of marine model organisms, through experimental work ultimately leading to an improved understanding of the human condition.

The June 2019 issue of the Biological Bulletin (Volume 236, Number 3) has an informative and beautiful cover illustration of the venous return half of the circulatory system of the horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus), chosen to illustrate an article in the issue: Effects of the Biomedical Bleeding Process on the Behavior of the American Horseshoe Crab, Limulus polyphemus, in Its Natural Habitat. The cover of this issue of the Biological Bulletin was designed from a freely downloaded Biodiversity Heritage Library file, coincidentally from a monograph about the horseshoe crab: Recherches sur l’anatomie des Limules — an 1873 work by Alphonse Milne-Edwards, the French medical doctor, mammologist, ornithologist, and carcinologist (one who studies crustaceans) who was director of the French Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle from 1891-1900.

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August 22, 2019byMatthew Person
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Entertaining Royalty: MBLWHOI Library uses BHL volumes, digital tools, and physical volumes in exhibit prepared for visit of His Serene Highness Prince Albert II of Monaco

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One of the most interesting titles which the MBLWHOI Library has scanned into the Biodiversity Heritage Library is Résultats des campagnes scientifiques accomplies sur son yacht par Albert Ier, prince souverain de Monaco = Results of the scientific campaigns carried out on his yacht by Albert I, sovereign prince of Monaco.

This important book series is part of the MBLWHOI Library Special Collection of the great voyages of scientific exploration. Resultats… brings together the science and data collected by the research expeditions led by Prince Albert I of Monaco (1848-1922) at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Centuries, and the title consists of 110 volumes published from 1889-1950.

The volumes were included as part of a small exhibition prepared by MBLWHOI Library staff for the current head of state of Monaco and great-grandson of Prince Albert I, HSH Prince Albert II. During the visit, MBLWHOI librarians Jen Walton and Matt Person shared past and present connections between Monaco and the MBL and between this important series and current MBL environmental and biological research.

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August 23, 2018byMatthew Person
Blog Reel, User Stories

A Report from the MBLWHOI Library: BHL Supports the Research of Recent Catherine N. Norton Fellows

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In 2016, Beatrice Steinert, a recent BA in Biology (2016) from Brown University, was an inaugural Catherine Norton Fellow. Steinert’s project, in conjunction with the History of the Marine Biological Laboratory Project, studied Edwin Grant Conklin’s (1863-1952) work in embryology and cell biology. Conklin documented the stages of embryo development in the marine slipper snail Crepidula fornicata using a camera lucida device.

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July 27, 2017byMatthew Person
BHL News, Blog Reel

A Compelling Decade: Reviewing our Progress at the BHL Staff Meeting

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Eight years ago I attended my first Biodiversity Heritage Library staff meeting at the Missouri Botanical Garden, and it was there I was asked to report at the meeting on what I thought the philosophy behind a project to build a global freely accessible online biodiversity library was. My thoughts at that time hovered somewhere around deeply idealistic and altruistic ideas having to do with like-minded libraries collaborating to make the foundation of legacy scientific literature, then accessible only to few, accessible to all. These ideas also related to the growing open access movement.
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November 24, 2015byMatthew Person
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books

A Small Town’s Large Research on the Health of the Seas

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When whaling and fertilizer manufacturing ended in the latter half of the 19 century in the quaint village of Woods Hole, Massachusetts, the town turned to research, growing quickly into a world renowned center for marine science. In 1871, the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries (the antecedent of the National Marine Fisheries Service), founded by the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Spencer Fullerton Baird, published Report on the conditions of the sea fisheries of the south coast of New England.

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June 8, 2015byMatthew Person and Diane M. Rielinger
BHL News, Blog Reel

Two Cities Named Cambridge and One Library Named the Biodiversity Heritage Library

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Last week the BHL Librarian and Technical Staff met at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for one of our invaluable staff meetings (our last face to face meeting was about one year ago right after the BHL Chicago Life and Literature Conference.)  These meetings are always lively and packed full of agenda items that we generate during our monthly teleconference calls…and usually a memorable meal or some cultural event are also included! After each of these meetings we return to our home libraries laden down with an armful of tasks to complete within a specific timeframe (which we try to stick to!). Check back soon for a post about the Meeting.
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October 3, 2012byMatthew Person
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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. Headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, D.C., 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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