All posts by Randy Smith

Blog Reel, Featured Books

George Engelmann’s Botanical Notes Can Now Be Seen!

The Missouri Botanical Garden (MBG), a partner in the Biodiversity Heritage Library Field Notes Project, has spent the last year digitizing the notebooks of George Engelmann. George Engelmann assisted Henry Shaw, MBG’s founder, in establishing the Garden’s research arm and corresponding library. He arrived in Belleville, Illinois, sometime in the 1830s but soon moved to St. Louis where he set up practice as a physician.

May 4, 2017byRandy Smith

Blog Reel, Featured Books

Humboldt and Bonpland’s Essai sur la géographie des plantes and its significance

Over 210 years after Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland’s work titled Essai sur la géographie des plantes was published, climate science, book conservation, and botanical research have converged around this 1805 work. This book was digitized and made available in 2008 by the Missouri Botanical Garden for the Biodiversity Heritage Library. In 2015, scientists published a paper detailing their findings as they retraced the path that Humboldt and Bonpland took on their ascent up the dormant volcano, Chimborazo, in Ecuador.

February 25, 2016byRandy Smith

Blog Reel, Featured Books

Wildflowers of Ecuador: Watercolors and eBooks

Every now and then an unusual and exciting opportunity arises to digitize a very unique item. Such an opportunity arrived in the email box of Doug Holland, the director of the Peter H. Raven Library at the Missouri Botanical Garden, one afternoon in January 2014. Anne Hess, daughter of artist Mary Barnas Pomeroy and grand-daughter of artist/teacher Carl Barnas, had decided to donate a collection of artwork and her mother’s unfinished manuscript to the library. It was with great honor that the Raven Library accepted this collection.

January 22, 2015byRandy Smith

Blog Reel, Featured Books

Book of the Week: A monograph of the Trochilidæ

“A feast of beauty and a source of wonder” was the phrase used by Sacheverell Sitwell, Handasyde Buchanan, and James Fisher to describe the images in ornithologist and artist John Gould’s A monograph of the Trochilidæ, or family of humming-birds.* It seems there are few who would disagree with this statement, as a five volume set plus supplement sold at Christie’s Auction House in 2011 for $217,845.

June 28, 2012byRandy Smith

Blog Reel, Featured Books

Book of the Week: Familles des Plantes

One of the defining characteristics of the scientific method is the gathering of empirical data.

June 15, 2012byRandy Smith

About BHL

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.”

All posts by Randy Smith

George Engelmann’s Botanical Notes Can Now Be Seen!

Humboldt and Bonpland’s Essai sur la géographie des plantes and its significance

Wildflowers of Ecuador: Watercolors and eBooks

Book of the Week: A monograph of the Trochilidæ

Book of the Week: Familles des Plantes

Help Support BHL

search

About BHL

Follow BHL

Join Our Mailing List

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Subscribe to Blog Via RSS

BHL on Twitter