All posts in Blog Reel

While much of the focus today has been concentrated on the existing life on planet Earth, and how to protect and preserve it, there is still a great deal of interest, and indeed things to be learned, from that life which has ceased to exist on our planet. With this in mind, we focus this week on the title Animals of the Past (1901) by Frederic A. Lucas.

Last summer, 2010, we implemented a scanning request form by which our user community can request titles to be scanned and added to our ever-growing online collection. The feature was a runaway success, with 787 requests received to date. As we work to fulfill these requests, we thought it might be nice to highlight just a few of the rare item requests we’ve scanned thus far.

You would be hard-pressed to find someone today who has not seen the legendary Jaws movie. The movie defined a generation and solidified sharks as one of the most gruesome and dangerous killers on the planet. But such misconceptions are an injustice to this diverse, and often harmless, order of fish, some of which reach a mature length shorter than that of an average housecat.

September 22 to 24, in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, took place the Global BHL Technical Meeting, it was the very first time all signed and prospective BHL partners were going to be together at such meeting. There were representatives from all over the world, including Australia, Brazil, Egypt, Europe and the US; unfortunately our colleagues from China were unable to make it. We had a very productive meeting to know each other and present each other’s work in order to describe priorities and requirements for a Global BHL.

Are those snails in your salad?

Apparently this is the question that our book of the week, The Field and Garden Vegetables of America, suggests that dinner guests will ask their host or hostess should Medicago obicularis be playfully added to the plate. However, rest assured, Medicago obicularis, more commonly known as Button Clover or Button Medick, will not threaten to ooze snail slime all over the salad greens.

It is no secret that the Biodiversity Heritage Library project has grown on a global scale, with BHL projects springing up in Europe, China, Australia, Brazil, and Egypt. Many of our new partners rely of the experience of BHL-US, as the original BHL project has come to be known, for insight and suggestions. One such partner is BHL-Europe, and a recent BHL-EU meeting in London proved to be a valuable opportunity to not only allow our European partners to gather and discuss various technical and workflow issues, but also to allow representatives from BHL-US to provide input based on our experience.