All posts by michelle.underhill

The seventeenth century was a time of great advancement for science, but it also presented a curious juxtaposition between superstition and science. A part of Europe’s Early Modern period and the birth of the Baroque cultural movement, the 1600s also encompassed the early years of the Scientific Revolution, when superstition and religion gave way to scientific reasoning. Furthermore, the Enlightenment, which attempted to replace ideas based on faith or tradition with scientific method, began to take hold later in the century.

The realm of ontology concerns the nature of reality, determining what exists, how it fits within a hierarchy, and how various elements are organized according to similarities and differences. Traditionally a philosophical question within metaphysics, today ontology has a firm application within systems biology as well.Anatomy ontologies describe the structural and developmental relationships between the various parts of an organism. Defining anatomical ontologies reveals a complete list of distinguishing characteristics for that organism or group of organisms. The act of creating an anatomical ontology requires precise definitions of the terminology used to describe a variety of phenotypes.

On April 15, 2013, BHL-Africa officially launched. BHL-Africa’s mission is to provide open access to the valuable biodiversity literature found within African libraries and institutions. The African consortium is hard at work identifying partners throughout the continent to sign an MOU and commit to working towards this noble objective.

On February 22, 2013, we announced that the Library of Congress (LoC) had become the fifteenth member of BHL! As a Steering Committee member, Library of Congress will help us further build the BHL collection by digitizing books in their vast library of over 151 million items.