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On 22 September, Dr. Rod Page, Professor at the University of Glasgow and creator of BioStor, gave a presentation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History Library about ideas for extracting and linking data across biodiversity repositories and primary literature. The talk, entitled “The Sam Adams Talk,” covered topics including phylogenetics, geophylogeny visualizations, linking article and specimen data across repositories, annotations, the biodiversity knowledge graph, and data as source code.

If you have ever heard of entomologist Harrison Dyar, there’s a good chance that it was in relation to a series of tunnels that he dug beneath Washington, D.C. Or it may have been in relation to his bigamy. But if that’s all you know about Dyar, then you only know the tabloid tales. Harrison Dyar was Honorary Custodian of Lepidoptera at the United States National Museum for over 30 years. He studied sawflies, moths, butterflies and mosquitos and described hundreds of species and genera.

Australia has over 1,600 species of native bees. As a young university student in 1979, I was keen to learn all I could about these diverse species. However, I soon found that the original descriptions of many of these bees were in obscure books and journals dating from the late 1700s to the early 1900s, only available in specialised research libraries. Unravelling the secrets of Australian native bees would prove to be a challenge! When naturalist Joseph Banks arrived in Australia in 1770 with the first British expedition, he found an astounding new world of undescribed species. Amongst the hundreds of specimens that he collected were a blue-banded bee, a resin bee, a carpenter bee and a wasp-mimic bee.

On the eastern coast of Florida, about 120 miles north of Miami, there’s a very special research center. It serves as a field station specializing in marine biodiversity and Florida ecosystems, especially that of the Indian River Lagoon – one of the most biologically-diverse estuaries in North America.

“Is the bald eagle really bald?” This was the question that a recent history of science undergraduate class at Harvard University had to answer with the help of BHL. Specifically, students were required to locate Mark Catesby’s 1731 plate of the bald eagle in BHL and use the accompanying text to determine the accuracy of the bird’s moniker. Mary Sears, Head of Public Services at the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, instructed the class on how to use BHL to satisfy the assignment.

When we talk about BHL’s impact on global science, we often focus on how our collections support the work of scientists, researchers, and post-docs. Our collections are also an invaluable tool for students as well, and not just college students either. Middle and high school students can use our primary source material to conduct research for classroom assignments.