All posts tagged with bhl

Today’s book is truly filled with Page Frights! Sea and Land: An Illustrated History of the Wonderful and Curious Things of Nature Existing Before and Since the Deluge, by James W. Buel (1849-1920), highlights some truly horrific creatures and plants, with colorful tales and an abundance of amazing illustrations. You can read about, and see images of, giant prehistoric and contemporary land, air and sea creatures, sometimes in battle with one another and sometimes battling humans–including early man.

Adriana Marroquin recently joined the BHL as the Field Notes Project Manager. This isn’t Adriana’s first time with the BHL or Smithsonian Libraries. She interned for the BHL and the Smithsonian Botany & Horticulture library after graduate school, and later worked as a library technician at the Anthropology, and American Art/Portrait Gallery libraries.

On February 4-5, 2016, Smithsonian Libraries hosted staff from the New York Botanical Garden, the Museum of Comparative Zoology (Harvard University), and the Missouri Botanical Garden as part of a training workshop for the New York Botanical Garden’s IMLS-funded grant, Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is hosting a 48-hour data correction event on December 7-9 2015. We’re enlisting the help of you, the BHL community, to help us complete 10,000 pages from BHL’s OCR output that we can then use as a training set to apply to the remaining BHL corpus.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is excited to announce the release of two new games by Tiltfactor that will improve access to BHL collections and open a new frontier for crowdsourcing and citizen science. Smorball and Beanstalk were designed as part of the Purposeful Gaming Project, which explores how digital games can make scanned content more accessible and searchable for cultural institutions.

Once an amazing diversity of birds–some in breathtaking abundance–inhabited the vast forests and plains of North America. But starting around 1600, some species began to disappear, as humans altered habitats, over-hunted, and introduced predators. A notable extinction occurred 100 years ago, with the death of Martha the Passenger Pigeon, the last member of a species that once filled America’s skies.