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When most people think of BHL’s users, they think of scientists accessing literature for research. However, one of our largest user communities is librarians, which use BHL to fulfill requests from patrons, saving their libraries time and resources by having immediate, free, online access to our material. One such librarian is Wendy Wasman, a librarian at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, who graciously agreed to give us a peek at the way she uses BHL to support her work activities.

He has been dubbed “The Father of Modern Taxonomy,” “The Father of Modern Ecology,” Princeps botanicorum (Prince of Botanists), “The Pliny of the North,” and “The Second Adam.” He is credited with creating the classification schema known as binomial nomenclature, and today, he turns 305 years old. Of course, we’re talking about Carl Linnaeus, and we’re celebrating his birthday with the release of our latest iTunes U collection dedicated to him.

Did you know that every second breath you take, you owe to the ocean? Yes, it’s true: the ocean produces more than half of the planet’s oxygen supply which accounts for one out of every two human breaths. More specifically, we owe gratitude to microscopic phytoplankton. These varieties of algae are atrophic organisms, able to produce their own food via photosynthesis. Oxygen is a major by-product of this fascinating process that transforms sunlight into food therefore, algae underpins ALL earth’s ecosystems and life on earth.

Meet Dr. Chris Mah, Research Collaborator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. His specialty is starfish, and he’s been using BHL in combination with Google Translate to efficiently conduct research involving foreign monographs.

BHL is pleased to announce that a selection of JSTOR’s Early Journal Content (EJC) relevant to biodiversity is now available in BHL’s citation repository, Citebank.

Like proud parents, we’re excited to announce that today BHL turns 5 years old! In 2007, the Biodiversity Heritage Library portal was launched with 306 titles, 3,236 volumes, and 1,271,664 pages of taxonomic literature, presented via a simple portal bathed in earthy tones. What began as a consortium of just 10 natural history and botanical libraries has today grown into a global project, with 14 US/UK consortium members as well as BHL nodes on every continent in the world except Antarctica.