All posts in Featured Books

Blog Reel, Featured Books

Fantastic Worlds: Exploring the Ocean through Science and Fiction

In July 2015, BHL founding institution Smithsonian Libraries opened a new exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History entitled Fantastic Worlds: Science and Fiction 1780-1910. The exhibit invites visitors to explore the fantastic worlds of fiction inspired by 19th century scientific discovery and invention. It features fabulous natural history books on topics ranging from marine life to geology and dinosaurs and expeditions to the polar regions and interior Africa.

January 21, 2016byGrace Costantino

Blog Reel, Featured Books

Kingfishers and National Bird Day

Today is National Bird Day, a day to celebrate and raise awareness about birds. We’re celebrating by highlighting one of the rare ornithology titles in the BHL collection: A monograph of the Alcedinidae : or, family of kingfishers (1868-71) by Richard Bowdler Sharpe. The work contains 120 hand-colored lithographed plates by and after famous Dutch bird illustrator Johannes Gerardus Keulemans.

January 5, 2016byGrace Costantino

Blog Reel, Featured Books

An Artist Steps Out of the Shadows: Using Social Media to Solve a Question of Identity

Over the years, we’ve discovered that social media is a pretty awesome way to learn more about our collections. Recently, a Twitter conversation helped us unravel the true identity of an incredible natural history artist. In November, one of our star citizen scientists Siobhan Leachman was working on adding artist machine tags to images in the BHL Flickr (want to learn more about how to do that? See this guide!). She was working on Wonders of the Bird World (1921), which was digitized for BHL by Cornell University Library. The title page stated that it was illustrated by A.T. Elwes.

December 31, 2015byGrace Costantino

Blog Reel, Featured Books

Tired of Poinsettias? Bah, Humbug! Then into the Smithsonian Libraries

This post originally published on the Smithsonian Collections Blog. View the original post here.

Tired of poinsettias? Last year, we at BHL asked this question in social media and offered up vibrant, joyful portraits of the amaryllis instead. But one commentator declared “Poinsettias rule!” And indeed poinsettias do reign as an economic powerhouse of the nursery industry, cultivated all over the world.

December 22, 2015byGrace Costantino

Blog Reel, Featured Books

In Search of the White Whale: A Legend, a Fossil, a Living Mammal

1820. Far west of the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean. A whaleship pursues a pod of sperm whales. Suddenly, an eighty-five foot long giant charges the ship, ramming it with its head not once, but twice, caving in the bows and sending the ship to a watery grave. This is the story of the sinking of the Essex, the subject of Ron Howard’s movie adaptation of Nathaniel Philbrick’s novel In the Heart of the Sea, opening this Friday.

December 9, 2015byGrace Costantino

Blog Reel, Featured Books

Travels in Southern Africa: William John Burchell

William John Burchell is credited “with having been the most prolific collector of botanical and zoological specimens.” [1] During a four-year scientific exploration of South Africa, he amassed a collection of over 63,000 specimens. And yet, Burchell’s contributions to science have been largely overlooked. As William Swainson bemoaned, “science must ever regret that one whose powers of mind were so varied…was so signally neglected in his own country.” [2] 2015 marks the 200th anniversary of Burchell’s return to Cape Town following his four-year expedition in South Africa.

November 19, 2015byGrace Costantino

Blog Reel, Featured Books

Using Art to Document Species: Cramer and the Lepidoptera

How could you make a visual record of a collection before the advent of photography? Through illustrations, of course. It was a desire to produce just such a record that prompted the creation of the magnificent plates accompanying De uitlandsche kapellen voorkomende in de drie waereld-deelen, Asia, Africa en America ([1775]-1782), by Pieter Cramer, which has been digitized for BHL by Mann Library, Cornell University. Pieter Cramer was a wealthy linen and wool merchant from Amsterdam. Born in 1721, he had a keen interest in natural history – particularly Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths).

November 5, 2015byGrace Costantino

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About BHL

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.”

All posts in Featured Books

Fantastic Worlds: Exploring the Ocean through Science and Fiction

Kingfishers and National Bird Day

An Artist Steps Out of the Shadows: Using Social Media to Solve a Question of Identity

Tired of Poinsettias? Bah, Humbug! Then into the Smithsonian Libraries

In Search of the White Whale: A Legend, a Fossil, a Living Mammal

Travels in Southern Africa: William John Burchell

Using Art to Document Species: Cramer and the Lepidoptera

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