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Australia has over 1,600 species of native bees. As a young university student in 1979, I was keen to learn all I could about these diverse species. However, I soon found that the original descriptions of many of these bees were in obscure books and journals dating from the late 1700s to the early 1900s, only available in specialised research libraries. Unravelling the secrets of Australian native bees would prove to be a challenge! When naturalist Joseph Banks arrived in Australia in 1770 with the first British expedition, he found an astounding new world of undescribed species. Amongst the hundreds of specimens that he collected were a blue-banded bee, a resin bee, a carpenter bee and a wasp-mimic bee.

The BHL API will be updated on 25 July 2016 to support changes to the BHL site. These changes will accommodate identifying additional Contributors for Items and Parts of items. First are changes to the API that may affect your existing processes. The Contributor and ContributorID elements in the result sets of API methods that return “Part” information will move. ContributorID will be included as a PartIdentifier in the Identifiers list. Contributor will be included in a new Contributors list. These changes are being made to accommodate more than one contributor per part.

We are excited to announce that BHL has been named a joint-winner of the inaugural Digital Library Federation (DLF) 2016 Community/Capacity Award, along with the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB)! During the month of June, DLF member organizations voted on an impressive list of 16 nominees to determine the award winner.

Over the past three months, BHL has welcomed three new Affiliates: Smithsonian Institution Archives, the Canadian Museum of Nature, and Národní Muzeum (National Museum, Prague). The BHL consortium now consists of sixteen Members and thirteen Affiliates.

The Smithsonian Institution Archives captures, preserves and makes available to the public the history of the Smithsonian since its inception in 1846.

Tuesday, June 12, 1866  A.M. pleasant P.M. cloudy. Studied part of P.M. Went to circus in evening & saw a hippopotamus for the first time. Got four warbling vireos before breakfast. The algebra is now rather hard.  (Diaries of William Brewster).  As a teen in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the 1860s, William Brewster (1851-1919) woke up early to collect birds before school, practiced taxidermy with friends, and carefully noted the dates when local plants flowered and produce ripened in the family garden. His early fascination for birds and his observant note-taking laid the groundwork for his career as a prominent amateur ornithologist.

A new and enhanced commenting system is being planned for BHL. The current commenting system will be disabled on July 5. In December 2015, we launched the ability to add comments to pages in BHL books.