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Dr. Margaret S. Collins (1922-1996), a renowned expert on termite ecology and distribution, taught as a professor and administrator at Howard University, Florida A&M University, and Federal City College (now University of The District of Columbia) for over 35 years. Upon her retirement from teaching, Collins continued her work on termites at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History as a research associate from 1983 to 1996.

Over the course of her career, Collins published more than forty articles spanning the biogeography, physiology, chemical defenses, and taxonomy of termites. Collins also collected specimens in the United States, Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Barbados, Belize, Suriname, the Cayman Islands, Guyana, Guatemala, and Panama. When she contracted dengue fever on an expedition in Guyana in 1983-1984 and was forced into a long hiatus from field work, she turned her focus to updating and preserving the termite specimens at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Eventually Collins returned to field research in 1994 when she once again traveled to Guyana to collect termites. In April 1996, Collins died while conducting field work in the Cayman Islands.

Save the date for a virtual BHL Day 2021 on 14 April, presented as part of our 2021 Annual Meeting! Themed “Reflections In Crises”, the program will include sessions reflecting on BHL’s roles in addressing the biodiversity crisis, challenges arising from COVID-19, and systemic racism in natural history collections.

Michelle Marshall is an independent researcher and creator of Historical SciArt, a research initiative dedicated to women in historic scientific illustration. In this guest post, Marshall shares more about how BHL helps empower her research on women in science.

Our latest quarterly newsletter is now available! From exciting news about our image collection in Flickr to an upcoming online Wikipedia Editing Workshop on women in science, don’t miss the latest news from the BHL community.

Join us on 25 March 2021 (1-3pm ET) for Wikipedia & Women in Science: Smithsonian Groundbreakers Edit-a-thon, an online Wikipedia editing workshop hosted in conjunction with the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative and the Smithsonian Institution Archives of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives.

Many of us have searched for silver linings during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2021. For many in the library and museum profession, one positive outcome of the mandatory transition to remote work has been the resurrection of some long-postponed projects. These are activities put on hold during normal times in deference to ever-proliferating, higher-priority onsite tasks. One such project in the Ernst Mayr Library and Archives (EMLA) of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) at Harvard University, is transcription of the digitized journals and diaries of William Brewster.

Robert Alexander Gilbert (1870-1942) was a Black photographer interested in ornithology and chemistry who worked for ornithologist William Brewster from the mid 1890s until Brewster’s death in 1919 and at various tasks around the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) at Harvard University beyond 1919. He was an Associate of the American Ornithologists’ Union.

Gilbert was not officially recognized for his photographic work with William Brewster, although Brewster did not claim credit for all the images in his collection. It was assumed that Brewster took all the photographic prints bequeathed to the Ernst Mayr Library and Archives of the MCZ (EMLA) upon his death. However, while conducting research for a book, author John Hanson Mitchell, former editor of the Massachusetts Audubon Society’s (MAS) Sanctuary magazine, discovered over 2000 of Brewster’s glass plate negatives in the attic of a building owned by the MAS. One of the images in particular, a photograph of a young, well-attired Black man standing in front of a rustic cabin in the wilderness, captured his interest. Mitchell was curious as to the identity of this young man. Later, in the mid-1970s, Mitchell had a chance encounter with an Archives Assistant at the MCZ who suggested to him that all of Brewster’s photographs were, in fact, taken by Brewster’s assistant, a young Black man named Robert Gilbert. This piqued Mitchell’s interest and launched his journey to discover more about Gilbert.[1] The quest culminated with the publication in 2005 of Mitchell’s Looking for Mr. Gilbert: the Reimagined Life of an African American. In 2014 an e-book edition was published as well.

Mitchell’s publication helps provide new insight into Robert Gilbert’s life and work. Brewster’s journals and diaries, now digitally available on the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), are also valuable records attesting to Gilbert’s contributions in a variety of areas. While only a handful of Brewster’s photographs in the MCZ collection can be positively attributed to Gilbert, it is clear that Gilbert was with Brewster for photo sessions during the years they worked together. The photographic relationship between Brewster and Gilbert is intriguing. There is new enthusiasm to examine Brewster’s journals and diaries more closely now that they are digitized and being transcribed, to clarify Gilbert’s role in photographic collaboration with Brewster. As a result of identifying connections between the collections in the Museum of American Bird Art at the Massachusetts Audubon Society and the EMLA, a cooperative research project is underway.