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

All posts tagged with hawaii

Blog Reel, Featured Books

A Digitization Journey, a Knowledge Journey: Personal and Professional Insights From My Work on Polynesian Researches

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In preparation for Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, I chose to reflect on the intersections of my past and present work in Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) collections, with historical connections to my home in Hawaiʻi. Part of my primary duties as a Conservation Technician with the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives is to stabilize objects before and after digitization for BHL. When I joined the team in 2018, I was assigned the task of mending the library’s 4 volumes of the 1853 edition of William Ellis’ Polynesian Researches During a Residence of Nearly Eight Years in the Society and Sandwich Islands. The idea was to kick off my new job with a project that would inspire me on a personal level, as an introduction to the value of both the digital and physical preservation responsibilities of our institution.

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May 27, 2021byKeala Richard
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Her Natural History

Isabella in Hawaii: The Adventures of an Amateur Botanist in the 1860s

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How does a young woman create the most important record of Hawaiian flowers in the nineteenth century? Who helps her identify plants and find a London publisher? Why does she leave New Zealand for Niihau, the Forbidden Island? Thanks to a magnificent book in the Rare Book Collection of the Chicago Botanic Garden Library (and a little research), we can answer these questions.

With 44 delightful chromolithographed plates, Indigenous Flowers of the Hawaiian Islands is no ordinary book. Its illustrations introduced the world to an exotic, endemic, and vanishing flora. Indigenous Flowers provides a marker to measure the impact of humans on the fragile ecosystem of two Hawaiian islands, yet another signal of the Anthropocene epoch. Isabella McHutcheson Sinclair (1840–90) was probably the most unexpected ambassador for plant conservation. Her breadth of botanical experiences in the Pacific, in both New Zealand and the Sandwich Islands (better known today as Hawaii), gave her a particular vision to recognize the effects of humans on local flora and fauna.

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March 11, 2019byEdward J. Valauskas
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Book of the Week: Hawaii’s Natural Treasures

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If you didn’t already know, we are in the midst of celebrating Asian-Pacific American Heritage month, which asks us to honor the people, culture, history and biodiversity of a broad region which encompasses the entire Asian continent and the Pacific islands of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. This region includes exciting and exotic locales such as Palau, Guam, Fiji, New Zealand, Hawaiian Islands, Tonga, and Easter Island just to name a few.

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May 10, 2012byJJ Dearborn

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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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