All posts tagged with field-book

Horace Waller was an English missionary and anti-slavery activist in the 19th century. In 1859 Waller joined the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA). As Lay Superintendent to the UMCA, Waller befriended the famous missionary Dr. David Livingstone and botanist John Kirk who were in Africa as part of the British government-funded Zambezi Expedition.

The North American Regional Node Meeting of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) occurred in Ontario, Canada on July 21-22, 2014. The meeting, themed “Advancing Informatics, Engagement and Content,” focused on progress updates and ongoing implementation tactics for the North American regional strategy. Discussions included the use of digital object identifiers (DOIs), collections and specimens in the GBIF context, organizational structure, and membership in both GBIF and the North American node.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is pleased to announce that nine of the Smithsonian field books that were cataloged and imaged as part of the Field Book Project are now available through the BHL portal! With over 43 million pages of the published biodiversity literature, BHL has greatly improved the efficiency of access to the published literature–much of which was previously available in limited physical copies in but a few select libraries in the developed world.

William Brewster (1851-1919) was a renowned American amateur ornithologist, first president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and a president of the American Ornithologists’ Union. He was an avid collector of birds and their nests and eggs, and collected over forty thousand specimens from 1861 until his death in 1919. His collection, bequeathed to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, is considered one of the finest private collections of North American birds ever assembled. Though Brewster collected throughout North America, his collection is especially comprehensive in its coverage of the birds of New England. Brewster thoroughly documented his collecting trips.

This is the final post of a joint blog series by the Field Book Project (FBP) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), showcasing examples of digital connections between collectors, field book catalog records, and the resulting publications of collecting events. In 1878 the United States Congress was investigating rivalries between four surveys (Powell, Hayden, King, and Wheeler Surveys) that had been sent west to study the nation’s resources and search for a potential route for a railroad to the west coast. The investigation made it clear to Congress that the current system was not working.

This is the second of a joint blog series by the Field Book Project (FBP) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), showcasing examples of digital connections between collectors, field book catalog records, and the resulting publications of collecting events. The first post in this series about organizations discussed the nascence of the US Biological Survey.