All posts in Featured Books

More volumes from the Wilson Ornithological Society are now on BHL!  Spanning back to 1893, the publications The Wilson Bulletin and The Wilson Journal of Ornithology are a great example of the kind of legacy literature that distinguishes BHL.

The Wilson Ornithological Society is the second largest ornithological society in North America. The organization of professional scientists and dedicated amateurs is named for Alexander Wilson, known as the “Father of American Ornithology”.

The Wilson Journal of Ornithology is a quarterly peer-reviewed journal that replaces its predecessor, The Wilson Bulletin. BHL had previously added some earlier public domain volumes of The Wilson Bulletin, but was able to expand the collection thanks to the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL) project, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The Wilson Ornithological Society granted permission to share these titles on BHL with a 5-year embargo on the most recently published volumes, so that now BHL has The Bulletin from 1894-2005 and The Journal from 2006-2010.

“The Librarian’s Nightmare.”

Such is the name given to a delightful and quirky vignette found within a very rare, and very special, orchid book: James Bateman’s The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala ([1837]-1843).

This vignette, the work of caricaturist George Cruikshank, depicts a group of men struggling to lift an enormous book using a pulley system while a harried taskmaster with a megaphone attempts to direct their work and demons dance about with impish glee on the sidelines.

The vignette’s caption, translated from the Greek, reads “a big book is a big evil”.

The scene is a humorous commentary on the massive size of Bateman’s orchid book. At about 30” x 22” and weighing in at over 38 lbs, it is the “largest botanical book ever produced with lithographic plates”.

In February 2016, the Biodiversity Heritage Library set out to digitize over 450,000 pages of field notes. While the BHL had already added some archival material to its collection before this project, the Field Notes Project is BHL’s largest undertaking of digitizing field notes to date.

We finished work on the project May 31, 2018 and are pleased to report that the project team digitized over 517,000 pages of field notes! 

The provenance of a botanical specimen was recently presented to a world-wide audience, even if they did not quite realize it. One detail of the Royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle had commentators confidently offering up the history of the sprig of myrtle used in the bride’s bouquet. This was commonly reported to be from the plant nurtured from the flower used in the marriage ceremony of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Every bride in Royal nuptials after Victoria carried on the ritual. If not quite true, it made for a nice, simplified story line.

It is a glimpse into a lush diversity of the past….and into possibilities for a resilient future. The Herefordshire Pomona is a classic in the science and practice of pomology. Compiled and edited by the eminent 19th century horticulturalist Robert Hogg and the physician Henry Graves Bull, who moonlighted as an enthusiastic amateur naturalist, the Pomona was an outgrowth of efforts by the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club to record and showcase the different varieties of apples and pears found in the orchards of Herefordshire, a county in the West Midlands region of England.

The National Agricultural Library (NAL), Special Collections has one of the world’s largest collections of nursery and seed trade catalogs totaling over 200,000 from American as well as international companies. This collection, representing businesses located in all states plus over 50 countries, was named after its long-time curator, Henry G. Gilbert. The earliest catalog is from William R. Prince & Company dated 1771. NAL continues to collect modern-day catalogs.

Animal Keepers’ Forum, first published by the American Association of Zookeepers in 1974, set out to solve a problem: animal care and conservation requires specialized knowledge, but institutions were limited in their ability to share experience with each other. Animal Keepers’ Forum has connected animal care professionals for the past 44 years, and serves as both a current resource for husbandry best practices and a historical record of conservation efforts.

Now it’s openly accessible on the Biodiversity Heritage Library as part of the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature project, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Thanks to permission from the American Association of Zookeepers, Smithsonian Libraries has digitized the complete run of volumes from 1974 through the present, with a 2-year embargo period.