All posts in Featured Books

Recently, the librarians at the Smithsonian Libraries’ Botany-Horticulture Library uncovered a “mini-mystery” involving one of our titles. It started when the botanical illustrator in the Smithsonian’s Department of Botany got a call from a colleague asking why a work in BHL was appearing with black and white illustrations rather than the beautiful color originals.

This Saturday, June 8, is World Oceans Day, the UN-designated day for the global community to celebrate and take action to protect Earth’s oceans. 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered with water, and every living thing depends on water to survive. Sadly, according to the United Nations, with the world eating more seafood than ever before, approximately 2/3 of the ocean’s species are overfished.

This is the fourth in a 4 part joint blog series by the Field Book Project (FBP) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), showcasing examples of digital connections between museum specimens, field book catalog records, and the resulting publications.View post one | View post two | View post three

The seventeenth century was a time of great advancement for science, but it also presented a curious juxtaposition between superstition and science. A part of Europe’s Early Modern period and the birth of the Baroque cultural movement, the 1600s also encompassed the early years of the Scientific Revolution, when superstition and religion gave way to scientific reasoning. Furthermore, the Enlightenment, which attempted to replace ideas based on faith or tradition with scientific method, began to take hold later in the century.

The California Academy of Sciences and our partners (all of whom are also BHL member institutions) are in the midst of a 3 year IMLS National Leadership Grant titled “Connecting Content: A Collaboration to Link Field Notes to Specimens and Published Literature.” This project aims to digitize published scientific findings, their related field books and specimens, and metadata for these items, link all of these resources, and make them available for harvesting, reuse, and repurposing without cost. At this point, the bulk of the field books selected for this project have been digitized and made available through the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

This is the third in a 4 part joint blog series by the Field Book Project (FBP) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), showcasing examples of digital connections between museum specimens, field book catalog records, and the resulting publications. View post one | View post two

It’s time to take a break from work and celebrate John James Audubon’s Birthday with the BHL! This was the man who is best remembered for his masterpiece Birds of America which is arguably the most prized Natural History work in existence. Just last year, the Smithsonian successfully digitized their entire set of all 435 copperplate etchings that contain 1,065 life-size birds representing around 500 species. Audubons’ birds are now available to be enjoyed and freely downloaded by all.