All posts by ulib-libraryjobs

Blog Reel, Featured Books

Tired of Poinsettias? Bah, Humbug! Then into the Smithsonian Libraries

This post originally published on the Smithsonian Collections Blog. View the original post here.

Tired of poinsettias? Last year, we at BHL asked this question in social media and offered up vibrant, joyful portraits of the amaryllis instead. But one commentator declared “Poinsettias rule!” And indeed poinsettias do reign as an economic powerhouse of the nursery industry, cultivated all over the world.

December 22, 2015byGrace Costantino

Blog Reel, User Stories

BHL Isn’t Just For Biologists

Charles Darwin is famous for the theory of evolution by means of natural selection. The theory hinges on the mutability of species, whereby the propagation of certain favorable traits within members of a species may gradually result in the evolution of that species. The question of when Darwin first came to believe in the mutability of species – when he became a “convinced transmutationist” – has long been a point of contention among historians of science. There are two prevailing theories on the topic. The early conversion hypothesis states that Darwin developed a belief in the transmutation of species while on the Beagle voyage based on observed similarities between the fossils he was collecting and extant species in the area.

December 17, 2015byGrace Costantino

BHL News, Blog Reel

Tree change for the Biodiversity Heritage Library Australia

This post originally published on the Museum Victoria blog. See the original post.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest online repository of library and archival materials related to biodiversity. Its aim is to make the world’s biodiversity literature openly available online. In Australia, BHL is managed by Museum Victoria and we have been contributing to this global resource since 2011. We have a team of wonderful volunteers who digitise our rare books and historic journals and prepare the digital versions for publication online.

December 4, 2015byNicole Kearney

Blog Reel

UPDATE: Technical Issues with BHL Custom PDFs 11/22-11/23

Problems with the custom PDFs created on the BHL website on 11/22 and 11/23 have now been resolved. The links to access any PDFs that were generated during this time should now work. If you still experience problems, please send us feedback: http://biodiversitylibrary.org/contact. Thanks for your patience!

November 24, 2015byGrace Costantino

BHL News, Blog Reel

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

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.

November 24, 2015byMatthew Person

Blog Reel, Featured Books

Travels in Southern Africa: William John Burchell

William John Burchell is credited “with having been the most prolific collector of botanical and zoological specimens.” [1] During a four-year scientific exploration of South Africa, he amassed a collection of over 63,000 specimens. And yet, Burchell’s contributions to science have been largely overlooked. As William Swainson bemoaned, “science must ever regret that one whose powers of mind were so varied…was so signally neglected in his own country.” [2] 2015 marks the 200th anniversary of Burchell’s return to Cape Town following his four-year expedition in South Africa.

November 19, 2015byGrace Costantino

Blog Reel, User Stories

The Australian Lepidoptera Heritage

Have you ever stumbled across a caterpillar and wondered what kind of adult moth or butterfly it would metamorphose into? Short of catching the caterpillar and actually observing what adult it becomes, this answer might be harder to come by than you might think. Most taxonomy and identification has been performed on the adults of various Lepidopteran species, and there are still many species whose caterpillar forms are not readily known. This is particularly true for many Australian species whose early life stages remain a scientific mystery.

November 12, 2015byGrace Costantino