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On the 30th June 1817, Joseph Dalton Hooker was born in Halesworth, Suffolk. The second child of William Jackson Hooker, Joseph would, during the course of his life, become a ‘botanical trailblazer’ – traveling across the globe to collect plants and theorizing on plant species diversity and geography.

Fauna japonica, sive, Descriptio animalium, quae in itinere per Japoniam … (Leiden, 1833-1850) is a set of five volumes based on natural-history collections made in Japan by German physician and botanist Philipp Franz von Siebold and his assistant and successor Heinrich Burger, with drawings by the Japanese artist Kawahara Keiga. It is the first monographic series written in a European language (French) on the zoology of Japan, and it introduced Japanese fauna to the West on a large scale.

I am a designer. I am an artist. I am an illustrator. I am an amateur photographer, a daughter, a traveler, an adventurist, a niece, a walker, a cyclist, a friend, an intern, a professional, a foreigner, a Latina, a Colombian, a woman, a strong woman, a bilingual. I am a person that has grow and re-recognized myself since I started my journey with the Biodiversity Heritage Library. I know the value of real things and how lucky I am for the people and opportunities that life has placed my way. Over the past eight months, I served as the BHL Product Development and Marketing Intern for BHL at the Smithsonian Libraries, designing products for the BHL Store and creating promotional graphics for those products.

Located in central Singapore, just minutes away from the city’s main shopping district, sits the first and only tropical botanic garden listed as an UNESCO World Heritage Site. Established at its present site in 1859, the Singapore Botanic Gardens (SBG) covers 82 hectares and is home to thousands of plant species. Since 1875, the SBG Library has supported research at the Gardens. Over the years, the Library has amassed a large collection of rare and scholarly literature and artworks that are housed in climate-controlled spaces. Access to these materials has traditionally been limited to privileged, on-site researchers.

In 2011, Australia joined the Biodiversity Heritage Library and, led by Museums Victoria, began to digitize the rare books, historic journals and archival material related to Australia’s biodiversity, and to make them openly available online. There are now 15 Australian organizations contributing to BHL and over 300 worldwide. These include museums, herbaria, royal societies, field naturalists clubs and government organizations. Just this week the number of volumes digitized for BHL by Australian organizations surpassed 1,000, amounting to over 200,000 pages. The great majority of this digitization work was done by the BHL Australia team at Melbourne Museum.

In the wake of the Quakers’ immigration to North America, a taste for the study of nature came “quietly” into being among descendants from the “tolerant” zones, notably the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.