Welcome to the new and improved BHL blog!

To provide you with a better user experience, we’ve updated the design, navigation and functionality of the BHL blog. Continue reading to learn more about our new features.

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Improved Navigation

Our new top menu makes it easy to navigate to different types of content, including news, featured books (including our popular Book of the Month series), user stories, campaigns (like Monsters are Real and Garden Stories), and technical updates.

Additionally, to reduce scrolling and provide a cleaner interface, each post will display an excerpt with the option to “continue reading” to view the full post.

Homepage Content Highlights

It’s easier than ever to stay up-to-date with our latest news, book highlights, and user stories thanks to our new featured highlights on the blog homepage. Check back regularly to see what’s new at BHL!

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Interested in particular topics, like technical updates or book highlights? With our new RSS feeds, you can easily stay up-to-date with the content that matters to you.

Simply navigate to your favorite topics using the top menu and click the “subscribe” link on the right-hand side to subscribe to that topic’s RSS feed.

Note: You will need an “RSS feed reader” to use this service.

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Questions or Comments?

We’re excited about these improvements to our blog, and we hope you are too! If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to contact us.

This week we feature another of our faithful BHL users, Dr. Toby Musgrave, whose work in horticulture has benefited greatly by his discovery of BHL. We asked him a few questions about how BHL has impacted his work, and we present them to you here in a traditional question and answer style.

Q: What is your title, institutional affiliation, and area of interest?

A: Independent Scholar, unsalaried Research Associate at Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, UK; and unsalaried Group Member of Interdisciplinary Evolutionary Studies (IES) within the Institute of Philosophy and the History of Ideas at Aarhus University, Denmark.

Q: How long have you been in your field of study?

A: My PhD was in garden history and I have been a freelance/independent scholar since 1994.

Q: When did you first discover BHL?

A: 2009

Q: What is your opinion of BHL and how has it impacted your research?

A: A hugely useful resource that has made my research less time consuming and less expensive/

Q: How often do you use BHL?

A: At least monthly

Q: How do you usually use BHL (read the titles online/download whole PDFs/Select Pages to Download/etc.)

A: Download whole PDFs

Q: What are your favorite features/services on BHL?

A: The range of publications available and the ability to request titles to be scanned.

Q: If you could change one thing about BHL, what would it be, or what developmental aspect would you like the BHL team to focus on next?

A:

• To have scanned and available every title listed by Blanch Henrey in her British Botanical and Horticultural Literature before 1800 (Oxford University Press, 1975)
• Continue digitizing horticultural periodicals from the 19th century

Q: If you had to choose one title/item in BHL that has most impacted your research, or one item that you prefer above any other in BHL, what would it be and why?

A: Last year I threw down the gauntlet to [BHL staff] and asked if there was any possibility of BHL arranging to have made available the entire run (1841-1955) of the UK periodical The Gardeners’ Chronicle. I asked because there is nowhere in my country of residence (Denmark) that holds it, requiring that I make time consuming and expensive research trips to London or Cambridge in the UK should I wish to examine the periodical. I was amazed and delighted that BHL has achieved what I asked. This contribution to the BHL catalogue has been a real boon to my research, with the bonus of being able to keyword search the PDFs of annual volumes that often run to in excess of 800 pages of tiny print. Thank you!

And thank you, Dr. Musgrave, for your faithful use of BHL and for taking the time to communicate with us to tell us how we could improve BHL for you! We will get to work on Blanch Henrey’s list of botanical and horticultural works.

For more information about Dr. Musgrave, visit his website at www.TobyMusgrave.com.

And if you have suggestions on how to improve BHL, or if you would like to be featured in our BHL users series on this blog, let us know via our feedback form, send a tweet to @BioDivLibrary, or post on our Facebook wall. We look forward to hearing from our users and continuing to develop BHL in the directions most beneficial to them.

Continuing with our new series on our users and their interaction with BHL, this week we feature Dr. Charlotte Sleigh, Senior Lecturer in History of Science, University of Kent (UK), which we present in a typical question and answer interview style. So without further ado, meet Dr. Sleigh, and read what she has to say about how BHL has impacted her work, and what she would like to see from BHL in the future.

Q: What is your particular area of interest/study?

A: Historian of science with a special interest in natural history.

Q: How long have you been in your field of study?

A: 12 years

Q: When did you first discover BHL?

A: About a year ago.

Q: What is your opinion of BHL and how has it impacted your research?

A: BHL makes many old, rare or hard-to-access science and natural history texts available at the click of a mouse. In the past, if I was not sure whether or not a book was relevant to my research, I would have to make a trip to London or other major archive, and seek it out, perhaps spending a whole day only to find it was not relevant. Now I can check quickly and easily online, flicking through texts. Nine times out of ten I can get what I want from relevant texts by reading online; sometimes I supplement this by looking at another copy or edition in the flesh. Even in this latter case, however, reading online first (and re-checking afterwards) is an integral part of the research. My research has been enhanced in that I am quickly able to cross-reference the work of many scientists and naturalists against one another.

Q: How often do you use BHL?

A: It depends on whether I am in a research-intensive phase; if so, maybe average 2-4 texts per week.

Q: How do you usually use BHL (downloading whole PDFs/reading online/selecting pages to download/etc.)?

A: Read online. I also go to the text-only version at archive.org to search the text for key words, then go back to read the relevant pages at BHL online.

Q: What are your favorite features/services on BHL?

A: As above, the ability to search for key words, though this is a bit of a clunky, multi-stage process.

Q: If you could change one thing about BHL, what would it be, or what developmental aspect would you like the BHL team to focus on next?

A:

• Easier access to text-only version.
• My browser (Explorer) sometimes struggles with magnification and gets stuck on a super-enlarged corner of the page.
• Search facility can be a bit hit and miss.
• Otherwise – I would just like to see more titles continuing to be added!

Thank you, Dr. Sleigh, for taking the time to tell us about your experience with BHL. At BHL, we particularly appreciate honest feedback about how we can best focus our resources for further development. The best way to determine this is, of course, to ask those who use our services. So, if you have suggestions on how to improve BHL, or if you would like to be featured in our BHL User series on this blog, let us know via our feedback form, send a tweet to @BioDivLibrary, or post on our Facebook wall. We look forward to hearing from our user community, and also to future opportunities to feature our users.