Welcome to the Biodiversity Heritage Library Blog

BHL developers have incorporated the Internet Archive’s open source book viewing application into the BHL portal, providing a new interface for using BHL’s digital books.

The Edible Mollusca of Great Britain and Ireland with Recipes for Cooking Them is a delightful fusion of taxonomy, geography, and cooking! The author’s preface emphasizes the “hitherto almost entirely overlooked” edible mollusca that are abundantly and economically available on the coasts, a qualifying characteristic that retains its relevance in the 100 years plus since publication. Hungry? Have some Cockle Soup!

In May 2009, two new members were accepted into the Biodiversity Heritage Library:These two important institutions will greatly contribute to the strength of the BHL. Below is a little bit of information about our newest members. Look forward to more detailed profiles of these two libraries as well as in depth overviews of the original ten members.

For anyone who has seen the new BHL business cards, this week’s Book of the Week may look vaguely familiar. Several of the species images used on the cards (and indeed at the top of this webpage) were taken from plates found in the Report on the Zoological Collections Made During the Voyage of the H.M.S. ‘Alert.’

One such expedition, the Challenger Expedition of 1872-1876, served to help “lay the foundation for oceanography.” The expedition, leaving from Portsmouth, England, on the 21st of December, 1872, traversed over 68,000 nautical miles during its exploration. The findings were documented in the publication Report of the Exploring Voyage of the H.M.S. Challenger during the years 1873-1876. This publication, which cataloged over 4,000 new species, provided readers not only with in-depth text describing the findings from the voyage, but also a myriad of beautifully illustrated plates to correspond with these findings.

The BHL portal is constantly changing as new features are added and old ones imporoved. Still, to better help you use the BHL portal “as it is” today, some BHL member library staff have created some quick “how to” videos to assist your use of the portal.

Two years ago, on May 9th, Jonathan Fanton of the MacArthur Foundation officially launched the Encyclopedia of Life and it’s key literature component, the Biodiversity Heritage Library.Though the member libraries of the BHL had been working together in various ways since 2005, the official launch at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. can be marked as the jump start to the project.