Welcome to the Biodiversity Heritage Library Blog

We’re excited to announce that we will soon be launching full text search on BHL!

Economic botany can, in a nutshell (excuse the pun), be described as the use of plants by people. This relationship spans thousands of years and includes both individuals and cultures – making this subject a rich and fascinating link between botany and anthropology. Economic botany collections can essentially be described using the term biocultural.

The Economic Botany Collection at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew holds around 100,000 objects from around the globe. Established as the Museum of Economic Botany by Kew’s first official Director, Sir William Jackson Hooker, in 1847, it was cited as a public repository for ‘all kinds of useful and curious Vegetable Products, which neither the living plants of the Garden nor the specimens in the Herbarium could exhibit’.

The Lenhardt Library of the Chicago Botanic Garden has received over $200,000 from a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant awarded to the Chicago Horticultural Society for the conservation and digitization of 62 rare and unique “language of flower” books published in the 19th century. The Lenhardt Library has been a BHL Affiliate since 2014.

The American Daffodil Society (ADS) is a group with international membership that has connected daffodil enthusiasts since its founding in 1954. In the spirit of National Gardening Month, we’re highlighting the ADS’ publication, The Daffodil Journal, which comes to BHL as part of the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature project. Early volumes of this quarterly journal from 1964-1968 are currently available on BHL, with more volumes on the way.

Social orders exist throughout the animal kingdom. Comprised of dominant and subordinate individuals, these orders dictate how members of a group interact, influencing everything from food access to mating privileges.

Sometimes, the behavior of the dominant individual is more extreme, and the “alpha” actively inhibits interactions between other members of the group. This sort of “monarchistic dominance” has been reported in male laboratory mice and African lions. The behavior is not restricted to mammals, however.

The 2018 BHL Annual Meeting was held in Los Angeles at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden. The meeting was attended by 35 representatives of BHL partners from 11 countries.

William Brewster (1851-1919) was a renowned American amateur ornithologist, serving as a co-founder of the American Ornithologists’ Union, the first president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and a curator at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ). As a part of the CLIR-funded BHL Field Notes Project, MCZ has been digitizing Brewster’s journals, diaries, letters, and photographic prints, which are held in Special Collections at the MCZ’s Ernst Mayr Library.