All posts by ulib-libraryjobs

Michael Mills For many of us, leading bird watching expeditions throughout Africa would be a dream job. For Michael Mills, Angola Country Program Manager for the Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, The A. P. Leventis Ornithological Research Institute, and BirdLife South Africa, it’s all part of the job. It probably comes as no surprise, then, that BHL is an extremely useful resource for Michael, providing him with primary source material about and fantastic illustrations of the birds he works to conserve and share with bird watching participants. Michael has studied African birds for ten years, focusing on their natural history, identification and conservation, with particular interest in Angolan birds. He discovered BHL about four years ago, via the Internet Archive, our digitization partner, website. Since then, Michael says that BHL “has been a great help with accessing some of the older and more obscure literature, which is often important in the work I do.” Accessing BHL 3-4 times a month on average, Michael most often downloads PDFs of the content he seeks, building a personal, digital library of the often rare books that formerly had limited distribution outside of the physical library space, not to mention outside of the countries in which the material is housed. When asked what his favorite feature on BHL was, he simply replied, “Being able to access old literature.”  His number one priority for the BHL project? “Make more texts available online.” We’re sure many of you can also second this request.BHL has been making significant advances towards building a program node on the African continent beyond our current partners in Egypt at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Our colleagues in Africa have been hard at work establishing the initiative following our organizational meeting in Cape Town, South Africa, in June, 2012. We hope to officially announce the project in the coming year, which will significantly increase our reach throughout this magnificent continent and enhance our corpus with the invaluable literature held in our African partners’ collections. We have no doubt that such endeavors will help us fulfill Michael’s and others’ desire to see more digitized literature online, particularly in the realm of African Ornithology. Many of you are also familiar with our Flickr project, which is bringing unprecedented access to the thousands of incredible scientific illustrations held in the BHL collection. Now constituting over 50,000 images, freely available for browsing, download, and reuse, the BHL Flickr contains a treasure trove of illustrations of African birds. We’ve selected a few of our favorites from v. 2 of The Birds of Africa to present below.Thanks to Michael for his dedication to the field of bird conservation and for helping others enjoy these marvelous creatures. Want to read a report of one of his bird watching expeditions? Well, you’re in luck.  We send our best wishes to Michael, and hope we can continue to build our collections to provide free, open access to the material he and other researchers need to protect our planet’s biodiversity into the future.  Created with flickr slideshow.

Want to keep up with all the latest BHL project updates? Then subscribe to our quarterly newsletter! It’s full of great information about all the fun things BHL is doing. The Fall 2012 Newsletter (excerpt below) highlights the 2012 BHL Staff and Technical Meeting; our new Technical Director, William Ulate, and the formation of the Technical Advisory Group; BHL’s Shark Week campaign; and BHL at ESA 2012 and ALA Midwinter 2013.Click here to subscribe to the BHL Newsletter.

Here at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia, the story of the so-called Bone Wars is well known.

In short, the Academy’s Edward Drinker Cope (1840-1897), also affiliated with U. Penn, and Yale University’s Othniel Charles Marsh (1831-1899), also affiliated with the United States Geological Survey, were both prolific, well respected paleontologists. Both unearthed, described, and published their finds of fossil fauna in the post-Civil War era when the discipline of vertebrate paleontology was quite young in the U.S.

On October 24-25, BHL Program Director Martin Kalfatovic and BHL Program Manager Grace Costantino attended the Internet Archive Leaders Forum in San Francisco, CA. The meeting, attended by 23 representatives from projects partnering with Internet Archive, provided attendees with a chance to showcase their projects, discuss their collaborations with IA, and nurture ideas associated with eBooks.

It’s that time of year again, when the ghosts, ghouls, and goblins come out to play, the dead walk, and little children dress up as their favorite monsters and scurry from house to house cramming countless pieces of candy into bulging bags.

BHL has been celebrating Halloween all week with tweets, Facebook posts and quizzes, and a Flickr collection dedicated to the holiday. While doing research for our festivities, we gathered countless myths and legends associated with the biodiversity of Hallow’s Eve. Come along with us as we explore Halloween from nature’s viewpoint, and, thanks to some inspiration provided by Smithsonian.com, find out how you can use BHL to transform yourself into the precise likeness of your favorite species!