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We’re very excited to share that yesterday, October 9, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) launched their new web portal as part of the 20th meeting of the GBIF Governing Board.  The new portal provides greatly enhanced access to the world’s largest database of documented evidence for the distribution of species across the planet. The scientific meeting was held in Berlin and webcast for the press and public. Tim Hirsch, Senior Program Officer for Engagement, and Tim Robertson, Information Systems Architect, introduced and demonstrated some of the new features now available.

This week we are celebrating cephlapods. Not sure what they are? Cephalopods are a group of exclusively marine mollusks that include squid, octopus and nautilus. They are closely related to snails, slugs and clams. Let’s be honest, you might be most familiar with them on your plate. These intelligent but vulnerable invertebrates are fascinating. They are represented in fossil records as long ago as 500 million years. If I had to pick, I’d say squids are my favorite 8-legged species, and not just because this is Squidturday. Squids defend themselves by being agile and fast as well as releasing sepia, often referred to as ink.

Who hasn’t seen the majestic beauty of a butterfly bouncing through the air or hummingbirds hovering near a feeder? If you haven’t you are surely missing out. Whether you have or haven’t seen them, take the opportunity to learn more about them today on National Butterfly and Hummingbird Day. Spread awareness and observe them in nature or at a zoo. While I can’t be certain if the holiday existed back in the 1800s, even then people knew butterflies and hummingbirds were special. This enthusiasm resulted in books with beautiful illustrations.

Two BHL-related projects were recently presented during the Digital History and Philosophy of Science (Digital HPS) meeting held at Indiana University, Bloomington, September 6-7. Trish Rose-Sandler, from the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Center for Biodiversity Informatics, spoke about the Art of Life project.  Daron Dierkes, from the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Peter H. Raven Library, spoke about the George Engelmann Correspondence Project. The Art of Life is a project to identify and describe the rich natural history illustrations hidden within the pages of BHL literature.

We invite participants for an event that will pioneer the mining of the Encyclopedia of Life (http://eol.org) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org) to address outstanding and novel questions about the ecology and evolution of biodiversity. We aim to identify questions and data for which biologists may lack informatics skills and resources to address or analyze successfully; and symmetrically, to guide informaticians to pressing ecological and evolutionary questions.

“Promoting the protection and care of rabbits, both domestic and wild,” Saturday September 28 is International Rabbit Day and we couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate the Leporidae than to highlight some of our favorite literature about rabbits from the BHL collection. From our Darwin’s Library collection, a virtual reconstruction of the set of the surviving works held in Charles Darwin’s personal library, “The rabbit book” outlines the history of the rabbit, its varieties at the time, and provides instructions for their care and breeding.

A blinking cursor on a blank screen. 137 million objects, 8.2 million digitized items, illustrations and photographs, artifacts and first editions, spanning 19 institutions, 9 research centers, and hundreds of years. Where to begin? It didn’t begin earlier this summer when I started working as the marketing intern at the BHL, and it didn’t begin earlier this year when I originally applied for the position. It probably didn’t even begin when I enrolled in the University of Washington’s master of library and information science iSchool. For the sake of argument, I’d say the beginning for me was when I was 6 years old and took my first trip to Washington, D.C.