All posts in Featured Books

On the 30th June 1817, Joseph Dalton Hooker was born in Halesworth, Suffolk. The second child of William Jackson Hooker, Joseph would, during the course of his life, become a ‘botanical trailblazer’ – traveling across the globe to collect plants and theorizing on plant species diversity and geography.

Fauna japonica, sive, Descriptio animalium, quae in itinere per Japoniam … (Leiden, 1833-1850) is a set of five volumes based on natural-history collections made in Japan by German physician and botanist Philipp Franz von Siebold and his assistant and successor Heinrich Burger, with drawings by the Japanese artist Kawahara Keiga. It is the first monographic series written in a European language (French) on the zoology of Japan, and it introduced Japanese fauna to the West on a large scale.

The Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL) collection has grown rapidly over the last year, with the addition of born digital material and in-copyright titles scanned by various BHL member libraries. It wasn’t until recently, however, that the collection included titles contributed directly by non-BHL members. This process—a significant departure from usual BHL workflows—is part of EABL’s effort to digitize valuable content from organizations outside the consortium.

The Field Notes Project collection is now over 400 items strong! We are excited by our progress and to share these field books to the global natural history community. For our feature this month, I would like to highlight some of the unexpected or eye-catching pages our digitization teams have come across so far.

In the wake of the Quakers’ immigration to North America, a taste for the study of nature came “quietly” into being among descendants from the “tolerant” zones, notably the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.