All posts tagged with bhlat20

When a handwritten entomological notebook by Carrie B. Aaron was digitized for BHL, it opened a window onto the life and work of a little-known woman in the natural sciences. Briana Giasullo explores how digitization, archival research, and linked data can help reconnect scattered traces of a person’s story and lead to new discoveries.

On Australia’s National Threatened Species Day, Nicole Kearney explores extinct species descriptions in BHL and the precious record they preserve of animals lost, threatened, and sometimes rediscovered.

When Field Museum librarian Elizabeth McKinley investigated a rare eighteenth-century work by E.A.W. Zimmermann, she uncovered a fascinating story of scientific revision, zoological nomenclature, and a surprising connection to the Field Museum. Now digitised in BHL, Zimmermann’s Geographische Geschichte can be explored alongside the earlier work it superseded and the ruling that secured its place in the scientific record.

Stephen A. Forbes and Charles Robertson were pioneering scientists whose groundbreaking research continues to influence our understanding of the natural world. Forbes advanced the fields of biology and ecology, while Robertson explored bees and their relationships with flowers and other insects. Their careful observations and influential publications laid important foundations for modern biological and entomological research.

Together, the BHL community helped secure our independent future. Now we are inviting supporters to become BHL Sustainers and help provide the dependable monthly support needed to keep biodiversity knowledge free and open.

In 1849, the first volume of the Papers and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Van Diemen’s Land launched a tradition of advancing knowledge that continues to this day. Established in 1843, the Society is Australia’s oldest Royal Society, and for more than 180 years its prestigious journal of scientific and cultural history has captured the changing face of Tasmania, initially called Van Diemen’s Land by British colonists.

Back in June of 2010, the founding institutions of BHL began a major digitization project that would span the work of 11 years, 9 institutions, 19 people, 40 tickets within BHL’s issue tracking system, over 82 comments on those tickets, and countless hours of work. Was this part of a grant funded project to facilitate the digitization and inclusion of millions of pages into BHL’s collection? No. This body of digitization and curation work revolves around the series of titles that are part of the Journal of The Asiatic Society. By June 2021, BHL was gratified to finally call the digitization of all public domain volumes “complete” to the best of its ability.