All posts by ulib-libraryjobs

Blog Reel

BHL Website Experiencing Technical Difficulties 7/16/2015

UPDATE: Tech difficulties and performance issues on BHL have been mostly resolved. Another brief outage may be required later today or tonight to complete the recovery. Thanks for your patience. We are currently experiencing technical difficulties that are causing slowness on the BHL website and affecting PDF generation and OCR display. We are working to correct the issue as soon as possible, and apologize for the inconvenience. Thanks for your patience and stay tuned for more updates.

July 16, 2015byGrace Costantino

Blog Reel, Featured Books

Happy Birthday Waldo Schmitt!

Do you know what carcinology is?

It is the study of crustaceans, a group of arthropods that includes lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, krill, barnacles and crabs. One of the pre-eminent carcinologists (a scientist who studies crustaceans) of the first half of the twentieth century was Waldo LaSalle Schmitt. Born on this day (June 25) in 1887 in Washington, D.C., Schmitt held various positions within the United States Department of Agriculture, the Smithsonian, and the United States Bureau of Fisheries throughout his career.

June 25, 2015byGrace Costantino

Blog Reel, User Stories

Life is Short but Snakes are Long

“Life is short but snakes are long.” While some may recognize this as a quote from author David Quammen, it’s also the name of a place you can go to get some very cool information about snake natural history and herpetology research. For instance, did you know that at least 15 species of spitting cobras in the genus Naja are capable of spitting their venom through the air as a defensive measure, and that some of them can aim “at targets the size of a human face with >90% accuracy up to 8 feet away”?

June 18, 2015byGrace Costantino

Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books

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

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.

June 8, 2015byMatthew Person and Diane M. Rielinger

Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books

World Oceans Day through Books: Corals, Oceanography, and the Deep Sea

This post is the third in our series leading up to the celebration of World Oceans Day on June 8. This series explores publications that represent important milestones in the progress of marine bioscience research and ocean exploration.

Charles Darwin will forever be remembered for his theory of evolution by means of natural selection and the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. But Darwin’s scientific contributions extend even beyond this monumental achievement.

June 3, 2015byGrace Costantino

Blog Reel, Featured Books

Happy Birthday, Louis Agassiz!

Naturalist, educator, and founder of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz was born on May 28, 1807, in Môtier, Switzerland, the oldest son of prominent pastor Rodolphe Agassiz and Rose Mayor Agassiz. Growing up near Lake Morat, Louis was fascinated by fish, catching them barehanded along with his brother Auguste. Louis was determined to study science, although his family encouraged him to pursue medicine. He studied at the Universities of Munich, Heidelberg, and Erlangen, earning a Ph.D. in 1829 and an M.D. in 1830.

May 28, 2015byMary Sears

Blog Reel, Featured Books

The First Comprehensive Description of Reptiles and Amphibians

1834 was a landmark year in the field of herpetology – the study of amphibians and reptiles. It was the year that the first volume of André Marie Constant Duméril’s monumental work Erpétologie générale ou Histoire naturelle complète des reptiles was published.

May 7, 2015byGrace Costantino