All posts in Blog Reel

The New York Academy of Medicine Library has contributed nine digitized titles (11 volumes) on medical botany to the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) as part of the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature project. It is very exciting to share some of the Academy Library’s botanical resources with the wider public.

On January 4, 2018, in the midst of a memorable storm in the Northeastern US, approximately 30 intrepid travelers met to celebrate the successful completion of the BHL National Digital Stewardship Residencies developed for the IMLS, Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian grant submission: Foundations to Actions: Extending Innovations in Digital Libraries in Partnership with NDSR Learners.  The program plan included hiring five geographically-distributed residents, all graduates of LIS or related master’s programs, to work on collaborative projects to improve tools, curation, and content stewardship for BHL. This work supported BHL development plans for the next generation portal for the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the scientific community was engrossed in discussions about evolution and the origin of species. The publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 fueled extensive scientific debate and prompted further questions regarding human evolution. A key figure in these debates was Thomas Henry Huxley, an English biologist and comparative anatomist.

The Harvard Botany Libraries have been fortunate to benefit from several field notes digitization projects in recent years. Materials have been selected based on condition, demand, and/or the theme of the funded project. The current CLIR-funded BHL Field Notes Project has enabled us to nearly complete the capture of field notes and plant lists associated with the herbaria collections. The most interesting and immediate benefit of the project is our ability to point users to the files that are available both in the Biodiversity Heritage Library and HOLLIS, Harvard’s online catalog.

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation has spent the past fifty years working on a complex ecological problem. The Chesapeake Bay is an estuary in Maryland, Delaware, D.C. and Virginia. While about half of its water comes from the Atlantic Ocean, the rest flows to the bay from 64,000 square miles of watershed – spanning 6 states and home to over 18 million people. Pollution from sewage, agriculture, and industry (as well as other impacts of human development) have degraded the bay’s water quality, damaging biodiversity as well as human health, economics, and recreation. Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) is a private sector group using many approaches to tackle this regional issue.

Without a doubt, Malacostraca Podophthalmata Brittanniae (1815-1875) is one of the most beautiful publications dedicated to Crustacea. This work, a very special proofprint copy of which has recently been digitized and made available on BHL by the Naturalis Library, was the work of two well-known names in British natural history: the young zoologist William Elford Leach (1791-1836) and the experienced naturalist and engraver James Sowerby (1757-1822). The background and personal history of both gentlemen had a great influence on the coming about of the publication.

Field notes are well known to be essential, primary material that provide details about collections and expeditions that aren’t found in published material or specimen labels. Field notes can also contain diary entries, poems, and sketches which give insight into the lives of the researchers themselves. And now, we can add the candy preferences of August F. Foerste to those insights.