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Last week the Association of Zoos and Aquariums held its annual conference in Indianapolis, Indiana. The conference draws around 2,800 attendees from a diverse group of institutions and organizations around the world. The Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature team was able to send representation and take part in the poster presentations.

Hello again from the NDSR Residents! Since our last update in July we’ve been focusing on transforming our research into recommendation outlines that we presented to the BHL Tech Team last week. As we head into the final quarter of our residencies, we’ll be focusing on tweaking these ideas, developing workflows and proof of concepts, and finalizing our recommendations in a Best Practices White Paper by December. For this update, we wanted to give a preview of what some of these recommendations will look like and invite some preliminary feedback from the BHL Blog-o-sphere that we can consider as we move into these final months.

In 1860, Charles Darwin had an epiphany. This was not an epiphany on the origin of species, as his monumental publication on the subject had been published one year earlier in 1859. This epiphany, which Darwin shared in a letter to his friend Joseph Dalton Hooker, was that flowers in the genus Primula display two distinct forms which differ in the length of the pistil’s styles and the height of the stamen’s anthers.

In 1907, the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries—now known as NOAA Fisheries or the National Marine Fisheries Service—embarked on a 2 ½ year research trip to the Philippine and neighboring islands. Of the many research trips conducted on their steamer the USS Albatross, the Philippine expedition resulted in a staggering estimate of 490,000 specimens turned over to the U.S. National Museum, what is now the National Museum of Natural History.