All posts in BHL News

BHL Members and Affiliates met in Chicago, IL, for the 2015 Annual Meeting (17-18 March 2015). The annual meeting is a chance for BHL Member and Affiliate representatives to learn what is happening around BHL and to give updates from their own institutions. This year, the meeting was hosted by Christine Giannoni (Museum Librarian & Head of Library Collections, The Field Museum Library) at The Field Museum, one of the original founding institutions of the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Since 2012, The Field Museum has participated in BHL as an Affiliate. The venue was a decidedly appropriate one, as, on the first day of the meeting, The Field Museum announced their decision to join BHL as a Member institution!

Since the release of Science Gossip a little less than a month ago, 3,600 volunteers have enthusiastically completed 160,000 classifications of natural history illustrations from the pages of 19th century science periodicals!

In celebration of our Garden Stories event, we’ve released some of our seed catalogs for transcription as part of our Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded Purposeful Gaming project. Seed catalogs are notoriously difficult subjects for Optical Character Recognition software (OCR) to parse (which produces searchable text files of digitized images), so searching the text of online vintage seed catalogs is often problematic.

Friday, March 20, 2015, we celebrated the March equinox (and, incidentally, a total solar eclipse!), when the sun appears to cross the celestial equator heading northward. In the northern hemisphere, this is also known as the vernal equinox. For those in the southern hemisphere, it means that autumn is upon them, and cold days are ahead. But for those of us in the northern hemisphere, it means that Spring is officially here! The coming of spring is therapeutic for many – a time for new life, a break from the grayness of winter, and a signal to get the trowels, shovels, and gardening gloves out.

All this week we’re celebrating the art, history, and science of gardening with our Garden Stories event, highlighting over 14,000 seed and nursery catalogs in BHL, featuring over 2,500 art images from seed catalogs, and providing great gardening tips and resources on our blog, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr,

Spring is coming! Get your trowels ready! We’re excited to announce BHL’s spring event, “Garden Stories,” which will occur March 23-27, 2015.

“Garden Stories” is a week long social media event for garden lovers.

Zooniverse unveils its latest project called Science Gossip which is an investigation into the making and communication of science in both the Victorian period and today. This project is born from a collaboration between an Arts and Humanities Research Council project in the UK, called ‘Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries’ (ConSciCom) and the Missouri Botanical Garden who provided content from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). The publication of books and periodicals are key locations for knowledge about the natural world.