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This year for Color Our Collections, we’ve produced a coloring book with illustrations from books that represent the evolution of the art of printing. This week on our blog, we’ll explore the books featured in the coloring book and the printing techniques used for the illustrations.

This year for Color Our Collections, we’ve produced a coloring book with illustrations from books that represent the evolution of the art of printing. This week on our blog, we’ll explore the books featured in the coloring book and the printing techniques used for the illustrations.

One of the great aspects of the BHL Field Notes Project is how the field notes we are digitizing – and the naturalists who created them – have connections to multiple project partners. Edmund Heller is one of these interconnected naturalists. Heller was a naturalist active in the early twentieth century who participated in several expeditions sponsored by different institutions across the nation, including a number of BHL Field Notes Project partners.

Walk into most any nursery or florist and you will see beautiful orchids of many colors and sizes, with “easy care” instructions attached right to the pot enabling even the brownest thumb success. Want to shake the winter doldrums? Attend an orchid show or meeting – there are over 500 local groups affiliated with the American Orchid Society alone. Orchids are as diverse as they are beautiful, with over 27,000 accepted species living in nearly every corner of the globe. We are not alone in our fascination with orchids. In the nineteenth century, Europe was gripped by what has been named “Orchidelirium.”  The collection of orchids from around the world was booming as the industrial revolution continued to change the economy and reach of Europe.

The last quarter of 2016 continued the year’s steady growth in new permissions for in-copyright titles: 46 in October, November, and December, bringing the year-end total to 154! Major drivers of this growth were the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature project, staff at BHL participating institutions, and the worldwide BHL user community, which regularly identifies material and recommends it for digitization.