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Featured Books
    All Featured Books
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  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
  • User Stories
  • Campaigns
    • Fossil Stories
    • Garden Stories
    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
  • Tech Blog
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Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts tagged with bhl-australia

Blog Reel, Featured Books

A Basic Guide to Rare Book Research

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In my job as the manager of the Library at Museums Victoria (Australia), I am frequently required to conduct rare book research for programs, displays, online projects, or to establish the provenance of a book. I remember being a little daunted by this task at first, not knowing quite what to cover or what the relevant references were in this field. I have put together this quick guide as a reference for newcomers, using digitised books in BHL to demonstrate how to “read” a book for rare book research. I’ve also included some useful links and further reading if you’d like to delve deeper.

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November 26, 2019byHayley Webster
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Origins of Australian Ornithology : The Evolution of Australia’s Bird Reference Books

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It is bird week from the 21st -27th of October. During this week, we would like to share with you some of the wonderful rare reference books on Australian birds and the stories behind them. These books have been digitised by the Biodiversity Heritage Library and are freely available in open access. The scientific reference works showcased this week include books from 1781 through to 1931. Ornithologists used these books to describe new species found within Australia and added to the growing number of previously undescribed birds during this time.

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October 21, 2019byCara Hull, Colin Tong and Ainsley Walters
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Our Experience Digitising a Rare Book for the Biodiversity Heritage Library

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Recently, we spent three weeks on student placement at Museums Victoria Library and were fortunate enough to be involved with the digitisation of the beautiful title The birds of Norfolk & Lord Howe Islands and the Australasian South Polar quadrant by Gregory M. Mathews. It was an eye-opening experience, making us aware of the patience and attention to detail that is a necessity for book digitisation.

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October 10, 2019byMarina Hunt and Brendan Bachmann
Blog Reel, Featured Books, User Stories

Provenance and Library Stamps at Museums Victoria and on BHL

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On the BHL blog, we often focus on the extensive biodiversity information made available through BHL and the innovative ways scientists are using the vast quantities of historical biodiversity data in BHL to conduct contemporary research. BHL is also useful for a range of non-scientific research, however, and is used by researchers in the arts and humanities as well as the sciences. Artists draw on the illustrations for inspiration, while humanities scholars use the digitised collections for historical research.

For librarians and book historians, BHL contains a wealth of provenance information, as well as the material to conduct comparative research. As a librarian in charge of a rare book collection specialising in natural history, I often use BHL to check if our copy of an item is complete, bound in the usual manner, or coloured in the same way as other copies.

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October 3, 2019byHayley Webster
Blog Reel, Featured Books

A Day for Worms on BHL

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is replete with publications which have had a seminal influence on their field. A highly-credentialed member of this category is John H. Day’s A Monograph on the Polychaeta of Southern Africa, published in 1967 in two volumes by the (then) British Museum (Natural History) in London. It is timely to celebrate this book now: on 24 August 2019 the author John Day would have had his 110th birthday. And, as of this month, the author’s own copy of the book has been digitised for the BHL.

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September 26, 2019byRobin Wilson
BHL News, Blog Reel, Tech Updates

BHL Adds Functionality Allowing Partners to Upload Crowdsourced Transcriptions of Digitized Archival Materials

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) has added functionality to allow BHL Partners to upload transcriptions in place of the automatically-generated OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for archival materials digitized in BHL. This functionality supports transcriptions generated as part of Partner crowdsourcing projects on Smithsonian Transcription Center, DigiVol, and From the Page.

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July 17, 2019byGrace Costantino
BHL News, Blog Reel

BHL Australia – Now a Truly National Project

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BHL Australia started 2017 with a dream – to digitize biodiversity literature from EVERY state and territory in Australia (for those readers not in Australia, we have six states and two territories).The Australian branch of the Biodiversity Heritage Library is led by Museums Victoria, in collaboration with Australia’s national biodiversity data aggregator, the Atlas of Living Australia. The Australian project started in 2011 with just one library contributing.

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January 23, 2018byNicole Kearney
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About BHL

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. Headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, D.C., BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”

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