Welcome to the Biodiversity Heritage Library Blog

My interest in the Smithsonian Institution, as an entity, began a long time ago when I was a young girl. I came to DC with my middle school to visit the National Museum of Natural History and since that trip, I was completely in love with museums and wanted to know how they operated–how all of those magical exhibits came to be, who was responsible for making that happen, and all of the different people who got to work together to make this large organization thrive.

The Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution 2013 Annual Conference occurred in Chicago, IL, July 7-12.  Tomoko Steen, of the Library of Congress, promoted BHL to conference attendees, including many scientists, teachers and experts in ecology and evolution.  Steen distributed pins and stickers and also posted a description of BHL, prepared by Grace Costantino, to the evoldirdirectory. Many attendees were interested to learn about BHL and several expressed interest in attending a BHL presentation at future conferences.

Where were they going? That is what the majority of the 44,000 soldiers and sailors on 400 French ships must have been thinking up until they landed near Alexandria on July 2, 1798.

In celebration of Beatrix Potter’s birthday on July 28th, 1866, today’s book of the week explores rabbits: The Rabbit, by James Edmund Harting, with a Chapter on Cookery, by Alexander Innes Shand.  This book was published in 1898 as part of the Fur, Feather and Fin Series, edited by A. E. T.

Today, we present an example of how BHL is being utilized to expand an award-winning database on the insect order Lepidoptera!  Generic Names of Moths of the World: Generic Names and their Type-species by Brian Pitkin and Paul Jenkins is a catalogue of more than 32,000 genus-group names of the insect order Lepidoptera. First launched in July 2004, the site was awarded the Podalirius Star in November 2004.

Harrison Weir, President of the National Cat Club, Judge at the first cat show in London, and all-around cat lover and enthusiast. This book of the week, an 1889 work entitled, Our Cats and All About Them: Their Varieties, Habits, and Management; and for Show, The Standard of Excellence and Beauty; Described and Pictured by Harrison Weir, F.R.H.S., was written by Harrison Weir, President of the National Cat Club which he formed in 1887. What is equally delightful to Weir’s loving descriptions of cats, their looks and their behavior, are his beautiful illustrations of cats throughout the book.

By now, you’ve probably heard the buzz about Magicicada septendecim: a type of cicada that only appears every 17 years in unimaginably large numbers. Periodical cicadas like the Magicicada septendecim are unique to the United States, and occur in the northern midwest and eastern regions of the country. These cicadas have an interesting physiology and reproductive system, which is explored in our book of the week taken from the Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Volume 89, Number 8: Morphology of the Insect Abdomen Part II: The Genital Ducts and Ovipositor, by R. E. Snodgrass.