All posts tagged with botany

Over the course of the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL) project, contributing organizations have shipped material to Internet Archive scanning centers around the country. A few have scanned their own material, and a few more have used third-party commercial services. One EABL contributor did things a little differently.

Betsy Kruthoffer, Librarian and Rare Books Cataloger at the Lloyd Library and Museum, selected a number of important titles from the library’s collection that were not in BHL. After weighing various scanning options, she got in touch with the digital lab at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County (PLCH), which had done good work for a Lloyd patron the previous year (and, conveniently, is located right down the street). PLCH agreed to do the scanning, with the understanding that the digitized books would also be made available in a PLCH online collection.

This quarter, the Biodiversity Heritage Library welcomed the Oak Spring Garden Foundation (OSGF) as a new Affiliate. The BHL consortium now consists of 19 Members and 18 Affiliates.

In 1860, Charles Darwin had an epiphany. This was not an epiphany on the origin of species, as his monumental publication on the subject had been published one year earlier in 1859. This epiphany, which Darwin shared in a letter to his friend Joseph Dalton Hooker, was that flowers in the genus Primula display two distinct forms which differ in the length of the pistil’s styles and the height of the stamen’s anthers.

Along with BHL Program Manager Carolyn Sheffield, I represented BHL as a delegate to the XIX International Botanical Congress in Shenzhen, China. Held during the week of 24-28 July 2017, the Congress (which is held every five years) drew over 6,000 botanists from around the world. The Congress provided an excellent opportunity to catch up with colleagues from around the world and learn about some of the latest botanical research.