All posts in User Stories

Welcome to the second installment of our mini-series featuring EOL Rubenstein Fellows and their use of BHL. This week, we feature Dr. Joaquin (Ximo) Mengual, a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution dedicated to studying Syrphidae!

If you caught our blog post yesterday, then you know that this week we’re starting a mini-series within our larger BHL and Our Users series. This mini-series spotlights a few of the EOL Fellows – scientists who have been awarded a fellowship through the EOL Rubenstein Fellows Competition – and discusses not only their work but also how they use BHL to support it. For this, our first post, we feature Dr. Breda Zimkus, a Post-Doctoral Fellow and Genetics Resources Facility Project Manager at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University.

For quite some time now, we’ve been doing a series on our blog entitled BHL and Our Users, in which we feature one of our users in each post and highlight how their work and BHL intersect. We find the users we feature in a variety of ways, such as targeting those users that send us regular feedback, are top content downloaders on our site, are actively involved on our social media platforms, or are curators or researchers at one of the various BHL institutions. One community that we have not yet explored, but that most certainly deserves to be highlighted, considering in particular BHL’s close relationship with it, is the EOL community.

Several weeks ago, we featured as our book of the week the Album of Abyssinian Birds and Mammals (1930), by Louis Agassiz Fuertes. In that post, we referenced one of our faithful BHL users, John Pittman (known to the Twitter universe as @drhypercube), who writes a blog entitled Diary of a Mad Natural Historian. This week, we have the pleasure of highlighting John as our BHL featured user.

For the past couple weeks you’ve seen a lot from us on the blog, Twitter and Facebook about Charles Darwin with our recent release of the Charles Darwin Library on BHL. This week, we feature a user dedicated to saving the remaining two endemic non-flying mammal species of Hispaniola, and his project, “The Last Survivors,” is funded by the Darwin Initiative Fund. The beauty of this story from a socially-networked perspective? This user actually discovered BHL via Twitter! Social Media is a beautiful thing! So, without further ado, meet Dr. Jose Nunez-Mino!

This week we feature a researcher at the Biodiversity Synthesis Center at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, IL, USA. The Biodiversity Synthesis Group is a component of EOL “dedicated to advancing biodiversity science and the core EOL mission through…diverse meetings, workshops, research programs, and outreach.” Our featured user’s research focuses on coral reefs and the challenges of both protecting these reefs and discovering new species of coral reef fish. With this brief introduction, meet Dr. Joshua Drew.

This week, we feature one of our users that has been extraordinarily active in not only using BHL content, but in creating applications that significantly enhance the information and knowledge that can be gleaned from our resources. The creator of BioStor and a huge player in the realm of biodiversity informatics, meet Dr. Roderic Page!