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Home
News
Featured Books
    All Featured Books
    Book of the Month Series
User Stories
Campaigns
    Fossil Stories
    Garden Stories
    Monsters Are Real
    Page Frights
    Her Natural History
    Earth Optimism 2020
Tech Blog
Visit BHL
  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
  • User Stories
  • Campaigns
    • Fossil Stories
    • Garden Stories
    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
  • Tech Blog
  • Visit BHL
Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts in Blog Reel

Blog Reel

Digging into the Smithsonian Libraries’ Vertebrate Paleontology Collection

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I’m Bonnie Felts, and I am a library technician for Smithsonian Libraries at the Natural History Museum. What most people don’t realize about our museum is that we have a total of 11 separate library locations, and I work with five of the collections. I am primarily responsible for the Vertebrate Paleontology library, which requires fielding reference questions, purchasing materials pertinent to the collection, and the overall care of the materials. Although in numbers, the library is relatively small compared to other libraries in our building, it is one of the most comprehensive Vertebrate Paleontology literature collections in the world.

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October 31, 2019byBonnie S. Felts
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Skeletons in the Stacks: Cheselden’s Spine-Tingling Osteological Atlas

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Halloween is just around the corner, and the skeletons have come out of the closet. From front yards reimagined as graveyards to bone-chilling retail displays and party backdrops rattling with more than a few spare ribs, bones are on display to awaken the Halloween spirit and set a ghoulish mood to the delight of trick-or-treaters everywhere.

The modern-day Halloween is derived from the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain. With the Celtic new year celebrated on November 1, October 31 marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the cold, dark winter. Samhain, celebrated the evening of October 31, was believed to be a time when the boundary between the worlds of life and death were blurred, allowing the ghosts of the dead to return (History.com 2019).

Over time, Halloween has evolved into the costume-wearing, trick-or-treating holiday that it is today, but the season’s association with death has remained, evidenced by the proliferation of ghosts and skeletons intertwined with modern-day celebrations.

Embracing the Halloween season’s bony obsession, this month’s book of the month is one devoted to the skeleton — Osteographia (1733), which has been described as “one of the most important and beautiful books in the British anatomical tradition” (Neher 2010, 517). This work is freely available in BHL thanks to the Library and Archives of the Natural History Museum in London.

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October 24, 2019byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Origins of Australian Ornithology : The Evolution of Australia’s Bird Reference Books

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It is bird week from the 21st -27th of October. During this week, we would like to share with you some of the wonderful rare reference books on Australian birds and the stories behind them. These books have been digitised by the Biodiversity Heritage Library and are freely available in open access. The scientific reference works showcased this week include books from 1781 through to 1931. Ornithologists used these books to describe new species found within Australia and added to the growing number of previously undescribed birds during this time.

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October 21, 2019byCara Hull, Colin Tong and Ainsley Walters
Blog Reel, Featured Books, User Stories

Exploring Prehistoric Sloths: From Thomas Jefferson to Sloth Poop

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I study sloths, and as popular as they have become on the internet, the thing most people do not realize is that we are living in a world majorly deprived of most types of sloth. Today there are only two types of sloths: two-fingered (genus Choloepus) and three-fingered (genus Bradypus). (You may have heard them referred to a two-toed and three-toed, but they both have three digits on their hind limb, so the difference is on the forelimb, in other words, their hand, hence: fingers.) There are only a few species of each kind of sloth and they all live in the trees of tropical rainforests in Central and South America.

But back in prehistoric times, there were many types of sloths: more than 80 genera across five different families. They lived as far north as the Yukon Territory and Alaska, as far south as Patagonia, and stretched from coast to coast in the United States and even colonized islands throughout the Caribbean. The smallest of these fossil sloths were still bigger than any sloth alive today, and the biggest extinct sloths were the size of modern elephants (but could probably walk around on two legs like an awkward bear). All this means there is a lot to learn about the sloths that are no longer with us.

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October 16, 2019byRyan Haupt
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Our Experience Digitising a Rare Book for the Biodiversity Heritage Library

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Recently, we spent three weeks on student placement at Museums Victoria Library and were fortunate enough to be involved with the digitisation of the beautiful title The birds of Norfolk & Lord Howe Islands and the Australasian South Polar quadrant by Gregory M. Mathews. It was an eye-opening experience, making us aware of the patience and attention to detail that is a necessity for book digitisation.

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October 10, 2019byMarina Hunt and Brendan Bachmann
Blog Reel, Featured Books, User Stories

Provenance and Library Stamps at Museums Victoria and on BHL

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On the BHL blog, we often focus on the extensive biodiversity information made available through BHL and the innovative ways scientists are using the vast quantities of historical biodiversity data in BHL to conduct contemporary research. BHL is also useful for a range of non-scientific research, however, and is used by researchers in the arts and humanities as well as the sciences. Artists draw on the illustrations for inspiration, while humanities scholars use the digitised collections for historical research.

For librarians and book historians, BHL contains a wealth of provenance information, as well as the material to conduct comparative research. As a librarian in charge of a rare book collection specialising in natural history, I often use BHL to check if our copy of an item is complete, bound in the usual manner, or coloured in the same way as other copies.

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October 3, 2019byHayley Webster
Blog Reel, Featured Books

A Day for Worms on BHL

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is replete with publications which have had a seminal influence on their field. A highly-credentialed member of this category is John H. Day’s A Monograph on the Polychaeta of Southern Africa, published in 1967 in two volumes by the (then) British Museum (Natural History) in London. It is timely to celebrate this book now: on 24 August 2019 the author John Day would have had his 110th birthday. And, as of this month, the author’s own copy of the book has been digitised for the BHL.

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September 26, 2019byRobin Wilson
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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. Headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, D.C., BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”

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