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    All Featured Books
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Visit BHL
  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
  • User Stories
  • Campaigns
    • Fossil Stories
    • Garden Stories
    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
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Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts tagged with flickr

Blog Reel, User Stories

This Bird Illustration Does Not Exist: Using Machine Learning and BHL Flickr Images to Produce “New” Bird Images

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I work as a web developer for the agency Cogapp, which is based in Brighton, UK. We create websites and other digital services for museums, art galleries, archives and the like, but every couple of months we hold a “hack day”. A hack day involves spending a day working on projects which generally revolve around a particular theme and which ideally we can do in one day. This allows us to get the creative juices flowing and to further our agenda of innovation.

The theme this past hack day at Cogapp was ‘Museum APIs’, but the looser interpretation was that we were to use open data provided by museums in our projects. I was inspired by the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s Flickr which is a massive collection of free-to-use scientific images. I immediately knew I wanted to utilise this resource as I love scientific illustrations of nature.

I’ve also had an interest in Machine Learning for a while and I recently discovered Derrick Schultz and his YouTube channel Artificial Images. Here he publishes videos of his Machine Learning courses which he runs for people who want to use ML for creative purposes.

I watched Derrick’s tutorials on training a StyleGAN Neural Network and the things he was saying made a degree of sense to me, plus he had published a handy Google Colab notebook with step-by-step code, so I decided it was something I might be able to have a go at.

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May 13, 2021byEmily Oliver
Blog Reel, Featured Books

The Garden: A Place to Learn and Experiment

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A garden is a place to rest, relax, rejuvenate. It also provides an opportunity to learn about nature. Staff at Smithsonian Libraries and Archives are also learning and developing new skills. Some of these new skills are related to digitization and accessibility of biodiversity literature.

During these months of telework, I am assisting the Digital Library and Digitization Department to enhance page-level and image-level access to previously digitized books for the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). This involves improving page-level metadata for items in BHL, uploading full-page illustrations to the BHL Flickr, and tagging the images in Flickr with species’ common and scientific names. These digitized books include a variety of content: plants, birds, mammals, reptiles, crustaceans, insects, and so much more. In the course of this work, I have the opportunity to view lovely illustrations. Recently a horticultural catalog caught my attention. The item is titled Vick’s Flower and Vegetable Garden (1878) by James Vick.

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April 15, 2021byAlexia MacClain
Blog Reel, User Stories

Women in Historical SciArt: BHL Empowers Research on Women in Scientific Illustration

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Michelle Marshall is an independent researcher and creator of Historical SciArt, a research initiative dedicated to women in historic scientific illustration. In this guest post, Marshall shares more about how BHL helps empower her research on women in science.

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March 16, 2021byMichelle L. Marshall
BHL News, Blog Reel

More than 250,000 Free Nature Images Now Available in the BHL Flickr

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Over a quarter of a million nature images are now freely available through the BHL Flickr!

Since 2011, we’ve been making many of the illustrations from BHL’s collection available via Flickr. While it has long been a community favorite amongst our audiences, in 2020 our Flickr’s popularity increased significantly when it received considerable media attention in outlets including Colossal, Laughing Squid, Český rozhlas, ZME Science, Cultura Inquieta, Hyperallergic, Graffica, Smithsonian Magazine, Open Culture, la Repubblica, Genbeta, My Modern Met (en Español), eCulture Greece, Daily Geek Show, Вокруг Света, Atlas Obscura, Shifter, Lifehacker, Indiehoy, Microsiervos, and Vice. As a result of this publicity in February 2020, we saw a 518% increase in daily views on Flickr images (2.5 million daily views compared to an average of 400,000) and an over 100% increase in visits and unique visitors to BHL. This popularity continued throughout the year, culminating in over 343 million views on images in 2020 alone—a 123% increase over 2019, bringing our all-time views to over 902 million!

Last year also offered a unique opportunity to substantially build our Flickr collection. With many of our partners working virtually in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we focused on projects to improve our digital collections remotely. This work included uploading images to Flickr. In 2020, over 40 BHL partner staff and volunteers contributed to the upload of over 90,000 new images to Flickr—a nearly 200% increase in images uploaded compared to 2019.

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February 18, 2021byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, User Stories

Historic Art Meets Modern Art: Artist’s Recent Works Highlight BHL Images

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Art is an integral part of scientific investigation and documentation. Before the advent of photography, illustrations were used to capture the natural world and share it with broader audiences through reproduction via woodcuts, engravings and etchings, and lithography in natural history publications. Even today, scientific illustration is important, articulating morphological, physiological and anatomical features with more detail and clarity than can often be captured through photographs.

Scientific illustrations are useful for communities in a wide range of disciplines. Our audiences have shared how they use these illustrations to support studies in the sciences, such as identifying the earliest observations on heterostyly in plants, researching the history of herbaria, and revisiting the legacy of women in science. Citizen scientists make use of these resources on platforms like Wikipedia and to research the identities of natural history artists.

Given that these illustrations are works of art, it’s not surprising that these collections are also providing a wealth of inspiration for artists like Dee Etzwiler, who recently used BHL images within nine pieces she created for a group show — Conversations: Reflections of 14 Women Artists — exhibited at the Maude Kerns Art Center (Eugene, OR) from 10 January – 7 February 2020.

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May 14, 2020byGrace Costantino
BHL News, Blog Reel

BHL Resources to Support Distance Learning

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BHL’s digital library provides free and open online access to over 250,000 volumes from the 15th-21st centuries on a wide range of biodiversity subjects. These collections offer great resources to support distance learning.

All of our content can be accessed online for free and in full through our digital library portal at biodiversitylibrary.org. No login, account, or membership is required. You can also freely download anything in our library in a variety of formats. Our FAQ provides information on how to search the library and download content.

In addition to our general collections, we’ve identified a selection of materials that may be of particular interest to educators and students. Explore these resources below.

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March 17, 2020byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Researching the American Horseshoe Crab: Connecting 19th and 21st Century Research with the MBLWHOI Library

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The venerable science journal the Biological Bulletin has been published in association with the Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Hole, Massachusetts for over 130 years. Presently, the publisher is the University of Chicago Press, with the editorial office in Woods Hole managed by longtime Editor, Carol Schachinger.

The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) was founded in 1888 through the diligent efforts of working scientists and Boston community leaders deeply invested in the marine and associated biological sciences as a tools to conduct research and develop diverse educational opportunities for the study of marine model organisms, through experimental work ultimately leading to an improved understanding of the human condition.

The June 2019 issue of the Biological Bulletin (Volume 236, Number 3) has an informative and beautiful cover illustration of the venous return half of the circulatory system of the horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus), chosen to illustrate an article in the issue: Effects of the Biomedical Bleeding Process on the Behavior of the American Horseshoe Crab, Limulus polyphemus, in Its Natural Habitat. The cover of this issue of the Biological Bulletin was designed from a freely downloaded Biodiversity Heritage Library file, coincidentally from a monograph about the horseshoe crab: Recherches sur l’anatomie des Limules — an 1873 work by Alphonse Milne-Edwards, the French medical doctor, mammologist, ornithologist, and carcinologist (one who studies crustaceans) who was director of the French Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle from 1891-1900.

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August 22, 2019byMatthew Person
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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. Headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, D.C., BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”

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Inspiring Discovery through Free Access to Biodiversity Knowledge.

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