All posts by ulib-libraryjobs

Are you planning to do some shopping for Black Friday? Do you want your purchase to make an impact on biodiversity conservation and research? Then the BHL Black Friday Sale is perfect for you! From November 23-27, save 10% off select products in the BHL store.

In honor of Native American Heritage Month, we would like to highlight a field book that documents Native American knowledge of natural resources. The field book was created by William J. Fisher, who lived in southern Alaska from 1879 until his death in 1903. Fisher’s notebook documents his final years collecting and looks at the relationship between the Alutiiq (Aleut) and their plants by recording medicinal and food uses for 48 specimens.

Have you ever been to a museum and wondered about the history of the specimens on display? If you have, then you’d probably be interested in talking to the museum’s collections managers, as their jobs include not only caring for and improving accessibility to the collections, but also serving as a living knowledge repository for information about the history of the collections. Take the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, for example. Amongst the many treasures on display in that museum are five whale skeletons suspended from the roof. Where did those specimens come from?

Over the past three months, BHL has welcomed two new European Affiliates: Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire – Lausanne in Switzerland and the Mendel Museum of Masaryk University in the Czech Republic.

On 22 September, Dr. Rod Page, Professor at the University of Glasgow and creator of BioStor, gave a presentation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History Library about ideas for extracting and linking data across biodiversity repositories and primary literature. The talk, entitled “The Sam Adams Talk,” covered topics including phylogenetics, geophylogeny visualizations, linking article and specimen data across repositories, annotations, the biodiversity knowledge graph, and data as source code.

Sánchez, Jesús. Datos para la zoología médica mexicana: arácnidos é insectos. México: Oficina Tipográfica de la Secretaría de Fomento, 1893.