You may not recognize all (or even many) of the East Indian marine species portrayed in the first known book on fish to be published in color. Don’t worry. It’s not a lack of ichthyological proficiency on your part.
We’re hiring! The vacancies for the five National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR) cohort positions have been posted through Harvard University. These five residents will work on projects related to the Biodiversity Heritage Library at BHL partner institutions in Cambridge, MA, Washington, DC, Chicago, IL, St. Louis , MO or Los Angeles, CA from January 2017 to December 2017.
In honor of the first Olympics to take place in Brazil, we are highlighting a book contributed by The Field Museum featuring birds of South America, Le Vaillant’s Histoire naturelle d’une partie d’oiseaux nouveaux et rares de l’Amerique et des Indes (1801). Among several titles chosen for digitization from the Field Museum Library’s impressive Edward E. Ayer Ornithological Library, housed in the collections of the Mary W. Runnells Rare Book Room, the entry for the volume in Catalogue of the Edward E. Ayer Ornithological Library characterizes it as “a work intended to supplement his Hist. Nat. des Oiseaux d’Afrique (q.v.) by describing and figuring birds not properly included in that work.”
Australia has over 1,600 species of native bees. As a young university student in 1979, I was keen to learn all I could about these diverse species. However, I soon found that the original descriptions of many of these bees were in obscure books and journals dating from the late 1700s to the early 1900s, only available in specialised research libraries. Unravelling the secrets of Australian native bees would prove to be a challenge! When naturalist Joseph Banks arrived in Australia in 1770 with the first British expedition, he found an astounding new world of undescribed species. Amongst the hundreds of specimens that he collected were a blue-banded bee, a resin bee, a carpenter bee and a wasp-mimic bee.
We are excited to announce that BHL has been named a joint-winner of the inaugural Digital Library Federation (DLF) 2016 Community/Capacity Award, along with the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB)! During the month of June, DLF member organizations voted on an impressive list of 16 nominees to determine the award winner.
Over the past three months, BHL has welcomed three new Affiliates: Smithsonian Institution Archives, the Canadian Museum of Nature, and Národní Muzeum (National Museum, Prague). The BHL consortium now consists of sixteen Members and thirteen Affiliates.
The Smithsonian Institution Archives captures, preserves and makes available to the public the history of the Smithsonian since its inception in 1846.
Tuesday, June 12, 1866 A.M. pleasant P.M. cloudy. Studied part of P.M. Went to circus in evening & saw a hippopotamus for the first time. Got four warbling vireos before breakfast. The algebra is now rather hard. (Diaries of William Brewster). As a teen in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the 1860s, William Brewster (1851-1919) woke up early to collect birds before school, practiced taxidermy with friends, and carefully noted the dates when local plants flowered and produce ripened in the family garden. His early fascination for birds and his observant note-taking laid the groundwork for his career as a prominent amateur ornithologist.
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. 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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