All posts by ulib-libraryjobs

Welcome to the second installment of our mini-series featuring EOL Rubenstein Fellows and their use of BHL. This week, we feature Dr. Joaquin (Ximo) Mengual, a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution dedicated to studying Syrphidae!

It’s no secret that dogs are some of the most popular pets in the world. It is estimated that 60% of all Americans own a dog, and if you’ve ever been a part of a dog-owning household, you probably know why. There are few other types of pets with which you can receive the same level of affection and interaction that you can with a dog, and for many families, their dogs are just as much a member of the family as the parents or children. The web is full of information and images of dogs, and dogs have even played an important role in art through the centuries, as far back as the heyday of the Greeks.

There’s no denying that, when it comes to vultures, most people feel no love lost if they fail to see them circling the skies in search of carcasses to feast upon. This sentiment is almost universally held, and so, when the infamous Indian vulture populations, which had become a staple throughout the country, started disappearing from the skies, roadsides, and roofs of the country, not many people took notice. Not, that is, until it was, quite possibly, too late.

While doing some research for a report, we came across a delightful book entitled Natural History of the Animal Kingdom for the Use of Young People (1889), by W.F. Kirby. The work is meant to be an introduction to the animal kingdom for adolescents, as the title suggests, and presents the structure of the animal kingdom, and many particulars of the classes within it, alongside some absolutely brilliant illustrations. While the text itself is quaint in the way it presents and describes various aspects of the animal kingdom, it was, as is so often the case, the illustrations that really sucked us in. We believe they represent some of the most colorful and vivid in BHL.

For the past couple weeks you’ve seen a lot from us on the blog, Twitter and Facebook about Charles Darwin with our recent release of the Charles Darwin Library on BHL. This week, we feature a user dedicated to saving the remaining two endemic non-flying mammal species of Hispaniola, and his project, “The Last Survivors,” is funded by the Darwin Initiative Fund. The beauty of this story from a socially-networked perspective? This user actually discovered BHL via Twitter! Social Media is a beautiful thing! So, without further ado, meet Dr. Jose Nunez-Mino!

This week, we feature one of our users that has been extraordinarily active in not only using BHL content, but in creating applications that significantly enhance the information and knowledge that can be gleaned from our resources. The creator of BioStor and a huge player in the realm of biodiversity informatics, meet Dr. Roderic Page!

This week we feature a user that has been active in BHL development since the beginning of the project, helping to see it go from a single digitization instance to an incredible digital library with over 34 million pages of digitized literature. An adjunct research scientist in the Entomology Department at the Smithsonian Institution, we are proud to highlight Dr. F. Christian Thompson.