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Featured Books
    All Featured Books
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    Garden Stories
    Monsters Are Real
    Page Frights
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    Earth Optimism 2020
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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 Featured Books

Blog Reel, Featured Books

28,000 Pages about the Sea: Challenges and Solutions for Digitizing the Fowler Collection

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Henry Weed Fowler must have loved fish.

Ichthyology dominated his entire career. He started as a museum assistant at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in 1903. Other experts in his field soon recognized his prolific skill. In 1918, an assistant curator at the Smithsonian, Barton A. Bean, reached out to Fowler (then still an assistant) for help identifying fishes collected by the United States Exploring Expedition. Fowler dove into the work. He delivered a lengthy 750-page manuscript in two years, helping to discover 18 new species of fish in the process.

For reference, the average field book here at the Smithsonian Institution Archives is 110 pages.

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May 3, 2018byCharles Zange
Blog Reel, Featured Books

“Abnormal apples” and “proliferous potatoes” – Uncovering the stories behind Kew’s Museum of Economic Botany Collection.

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Economic botany can, in a nutshell (excuse the pun), be described as the use of plants by people. This relationship spans thousands of years and includes both individuals and cultures – making this subject a rich and fascinating link between botany and anthropology. Economic botany collections can essentially be described using the term biocultural.

The Economic Botany Collection at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew holds around 100,000 objects from around the globe. Established as the Museum of Economic Botany by Kew’s first official Director, Sir William Jackson Hooker, in 1847, it was cited as a public repository for ‘all kinds of useful and curious Vegetable Products, which neither the living plants of the Garden nor the specimens in the Herbarium could exhibit’.

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April 26, 2018byJoanna Durant
Blog Reel, Featured Books

American Daffodil Society Expands Access through BHL and ‘DaffLibrary’

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The American Daffodil Society (ADS) is a group with international membership that has connected daffodil enthusiasts since its founding in 1954. In the spirit of National Gardening Month, we’re highlighting the ADS’ publication, The Daffodil Journal, which comes to BHL as part of the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature project. Early volumes of this quarterly journal from 1964-1968 are currently available on BHL, with more volumes on the way.

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April 19, 2018byElizabeth Meyer
Blog Reel, Featured Books

From ‘Shotgun Ornithology’ to Nature Conservation: Scientific Stories and Data from the Field Notes of William Brewster

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William Brewster (1851-1919) was a renowned American amateur ornithologist, serving as a co-founder of the American Ornithologists’ Union, the first president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and a curator at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ). As a part of the CLIR-funded BHL Field Notes Project, MCZ has been digitizing Brewster’s journals, diaries, letters, and photographic prints, which are held in Special Collections at the MCZ’s Ernst Mayr Library.

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April 5, 2018byElizabeth Meyer
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Exploring the First American Silva

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The North American Sylva is a beautiful scientifically and historically-significant work. Authored by François-André Michaux, it is the first American silva – a descriptive flora of forest trees. Published originally in French in 1810, the first English version appeared in 1817, and it was further enhanced with supplementary volumes by Thomas Nuttall in the 1840s.

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March 29, 2018byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Exploring the Birds of Canada

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Did someone say Spring?!

In Ottawa, we start to see the Canada Geese returning to their summer nesting grounds around this time of year. Large flocks of them fly overhead in the same v-shaped formations we saw months ago when they left in the late fall.​

Aren’t migratory birds fascinating? Along with so many other Canadian bird species.

Birds of Canada by Percy Algernon Taverner remains one of the best accounts of the kinds of birds that occur in Canada. And the first thirty-six pages holds just the right amount of information to open the science of ornithology to bird lovers, yet still enough information to satisfy research needs.​

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March 22, 2018byElizabeth Smith
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Explore Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum on BHL

The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University has contributed a century of their publications to BHL as a part of the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature project, including: Bulletin of Popular Information (1915-1940) and Arnoldia (1942-2016). Nancy Rose, an arborist with a background in woody plant research and horticulture extension, served as Arnoldia’s editor from 2008 to February 2018. Before retiring, she shared with us some reflections on the their contributions to BHL.

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March 21, 2018byElizabeth Meyer
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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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