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News
Featured Books
    All Featured Books
    Book of the Month Series
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    Fossil Stories
    Garden Stories
    Monsters Are Real
    Page Frights
    Her Natural History
    Earth Optimism 2020
Tech Blog
Visit BHL
  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
  • User Stories
  • Campaigns
    • Fossil Stories
    • Garden Stories
    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
  • Tech Blog
  • Visit BHL
Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts in Blog Reel

Blog Reel, Featured Books

The Last Heath Hen, and Other News From the Collecting Net In Woods Hole

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“On Martha’s Vineyard Island just across the Sound from the Marine Biological Laboratory is the home of the lone survivor of the Heath Hen. The death of this individual will also mean the death of its race, and then another bird will have taken its place among the endless array of extinct forms. The numbers of Heath Hen have been closely followed by ornithologists and since 1908 a detailed census has been taken of the birds each year. For the first time in the history of ornithology a species has been studied and photographed in its normal environment down to the very last individual.”

-Professor Alfred O Gross, Bowdoin College, as written in The Collecting Net: Volume 5, Number 3, 12 July 1930.

We came across a unique article, “The Last Heath Hen,” in the Biodiversity Heritage Library recently. The article from The Collecting Net newspaper is a beautifully-crafted account from 1930 of the then-last stand and near extinction of the last animal of the ground-feeding Heath Hen species (Tympanuchus cupido cupido), a member of the grouse family and subspecies of the Prairie Chicken. This species once ranged from Maine to the Carolinas in American colonial times and before but was all but extinct on the US mainland by 1870, except for it holding its own in the scrub brush, open fields, and low pine forests of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

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April 29, 2021byMatthew Person
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Earth Day 2021: Exploring Earth’s Biodiversity through Books

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Since its inaugural event on 22 April 1970, Earth Day has grown to an international annual celebration of the Earth and a movement to raise awareness about and support for environmental protection. This year’s theme, Restore Our Earth, emphasizes that, “As the world returns to normal, we can’t go back to business-as-usual.” As we face widespread climate change and unprecedented biodiversity declines—with more than a million species threatened with extinction—immediate, online access to essential literature is ever-more important, allowing scientists to conduct research more quickly and efficiently and improving our ability to respond to these crises. For fifteen years, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) has worked as a global consortium to provide this vital access, empower research, and make a real difference in our ability to improve the health of our planet for every species that calls it home.

This year, several of our global partners have selected a few titles and authors from the BHL collection to commemorate Earth Day. From exploring Asia’s vast and unique biodiversity to inspiring conservation through a popular publication on birds, providing practical methods for conducting surveys and using the data to support conservation practices, and marveling at the extraordinary biodiversity of past ages, these titles highlight the richness of our planet’s biodiversity and remind us of the importance of protecting the wonderful, wild, and beautiful life on Earth.

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April 22, 2021byContributors to Earth Day 2021 Feature
Blog Reel, Featured Books

The Garden: A Place to Learn and Experiment

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A garden is a place to rest, relax, rejuvenate. It also provides an opportunity to learn about nature. Staff at Smithsonian Libraries and Archives are also learning and developing new skills. Some of these new skills are related to digitization and accessibility of biodiversity literature.

During these months of telework, I am assisting the Digital Library and Digitization Department to enhance page-level and image-level access to previously digitized books for the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). This involves improving page-level metadata for items in BHL, uploading full-page illustrations to the BHL Flickr, and tagging the images in Flickr with species’ common and scientific names. These digitized books include a variety of content: plants, birds, mammals, reptiles, crustaceans, insects, and so much more. In the course of this work, I have the opportunity to view lovely illustrations. Recently a horticultural catalog caught my attention. The item is titled Vick’s Flower and Vegetable Garden (1878) by James Vick.

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April 15, 2021byAlexia MacClain
BHL News, Blog Reel

Language of Flowers Virtual Symposium on 30 April 2021

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On 30 April 2021, join the Chicago Botanic Garden’s Lenhardt Library and the Caxton Club for a free, virtual symposium celebrating the Language of Flowers—a popular literary trend in the 19th century that presented the world of botany through dictionaries of flowers and associated meanings, floral poetry and prose, offering a sentimental view of natural history.

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April 8, 2021byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, User Stories

Hidden Biodiversity: Exploring Neotropical Fungus Weevils With the Help of BHL

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In the last decades of the 19th century, a monumental publication on the biodiversity of Mexico and Central America began publication—Biologia Centrali-Americana. Published in 215 parts from 1879 to 1915 by the editors Frederick DuCane Godman and Osbert Salvin, the work describes over 50,000 species and is illustrated with over 1,600 lithographic plates depicting over 18,000 species. Remarkable for its time, the title is still vitally important for the study of Neotropical biodiversity today, as it contained virtually all known information at the time about Mexican and Central American flora and fauna.

Biologia Centrali-Americana is a particularly important resource for entomologist Samanta Orellana, a PhD student in evolutionary biology at the Dr. Nico Franz Lab of Arizona State University (ASU) and a research assistant in the ASU Biocollections of the Biodiversity Knowledge Integration Center. Orellana began studying insects and working with entomological collections more than a decade ago, during her undergraduate studies in her home country of Guatemala.

“For many insect groups in Guatemala and the rest of Central America, Biologia Centrali-Americana still represents the only source of information available for the region,” states Orellana.

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April 6, 2021byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Her Natural History

Graceanna Lewis: A Naturalist and Abolitionist

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“To her mind the truths of science seem revealed.”

That’s how Phebe A. Hanaford, author of Daughters of America (c. 1882), described naturalist Graceanna Lewis, one of the first three woman to be accepted into the Academy of Natural Sciences. But Lewis was not only one of the first professionally acknowledged women naturalists; she was also an abolitionist and social reformer who worked for the advancement of science as well as human rights. Researchers can find many publications by and about this intriguing woman in the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives’ Digital Library and the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

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March 30, 2021byErin Rushing
BHL News, Blog Reel

Join Us on 16 April 2021 for Notes from Nature: The Biodiversity Heritage Collections

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Join us for a special closing event presented as part of the 2021 BHL Annual Meeting!

Notes from Nature: The Biodiversity Heritage Collections
Date and Time: Friday, 16 April 2021 @ 1130-1230 UTC
Location: Online (via Zoom webinar)

Discover the natural world through a vast collection of biodiversity knowledge online. Find out how Singapore and France have worked together across boundaries to advance biodiversity literature, digitisation and public outreach efforts.

This discussion is organised by the National Library Singapore and Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, France in partnership with the Biodiversity Heritage Library, the world’s largest open access online repository of biodiversity knowledge.

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March 30, 2021byGrace Costantino
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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. Headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, D.C., BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”

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