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On May 20th, Graham Higley, head of library and information services at the Natural History Museum in London, accepted the 2010 John Thackray medal, which was awarded to the BHL in recognition of our past three years of work building our digital library. Mr. Higley (pictured left) accepted this award on behalf of Tom Garnett, Director of the BHL.

On December 16, 2010 Science released a paper, “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books” that describes data mining research using a vast textual archive created by the Google Books. The abstract reads, “We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of “culturomics”, focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. ‘Culturomics’ extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.”

Four years ago today, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, along with the Encyclopedia of Life, was officially launched during an event at the National Academy of Sciences.At the time of the launch, there were just over a million pages of taxonomic literature available on the site. Today, there are now just short of 34 million pages.

Scientific Breakthrough Alert! Recent studies have revealed that we may soon be seeing dinosaurs again in our modern age! How is this possible? One scientist has found that birds, the closest living relatives to the behemoths that have so completely captured the imagination of humans, are showing signs of de-evolution, reverting back to the forms of their dinosaur ancestors.

On March 8-9, 2011, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) Institutional Council met at Smithsonian Institution Libraries in Washington, D.C. The annual meeting is held to cover issues related to governance of the BHL, prioritization of the work of the technical development team, and discussion of the ongoing sustainability going forward of the BHL. The BHL Institutional Council is composed of the directors, or their designates, from each of the twelve member libraries.

Here at BHL, we want to do a better job of connecting with our users. We want to interact with you, know what you think, what you would like to see, and have you contribute to the biodiversity conversation that shapes the development and progress of the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The recent debut of our new series on this blog, focusing on our users and how they use BHL for their work, is an example of our passion to get to know you, our users, more, and interact in new ways with you. However, the blog is not the only way we hope to accomplish this.

So, you’ve got an iPad or another eBook reader, and you’re thinking, “BHL was just made for this!” It can be a little tricky to determine how best to use BHL on your reader or iPad, so we thought we’d take a few minutes to publish some tips that might help. So…

First off, you always have the option to simply download the PDF from BHL and view your content that way. If you’re using an iPad or iPod Touch, you’ll need an application that will let you read these PDFs, such as GoodReader. If you go to the BHL website and choose the option to download the PDF on your iPad, your iPad should then give you the option to open the PDF with any one of the eBook reader applications you have installed.