All posts tagged with history

In May 2009, two new members were accepted into the Biodiversity Heritage Library:These two important institutions will greatly contribute to the strength of the BHL. Below is a little bit of information about our newest members. Look forward to more detailed profiles of these two libraries as well as in depth overviews of the original ten members.

Two years ago, on May 9th, Jonathan Fanton of the MacArthur Foundation officially launched the Encyclopedia of Life and it’s key literature component, the Biodiversity Heritage Library.Though the member libraries of the BHL had been working together in various ways since 2005, the official launch at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. can be marked as the jump start to the project.

What appears to be a male Dodo bird (Raphus cucullatus) approximately 2 and a half feet tall has been discovered today, April 1, nesting among the bushes in the butterfly garden of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. How the creature, that hasn’t been seen since the 17th century, has come to reside Washington, DC remains a mystery. Smithsonian Security was alerted to the presence of the bird by an alert tourist who heard the loud syncopated calls of the once thought extinct bird. Nicknamed “Lazarus,” the Dodo exhibits a friendly curiosity about humans, clearly enjoying the excitement and attention its presence is generating.

Today, February 12, 2008, we celebrate the 199th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. Last year we honored the 300th anniversary of the birth of Carl Linné and next year will be the double celebrations for Darwin’s bicentenary and the sesquicentennial (mark your calenders now for November 24th!) of the publication of On the Origin of Species. 2008 is thus a good year for those of us involved with the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) to pause for a moment between these landmark anniversary years of 2007 and 2009.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History hosted a day long symposium to celebrate 300 years of Linnaean taxonomy. In addition to the symposium, the museum featured an exhibition of a 1st Edition of Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae. The exhibition, “A Tribute to Carl Linnaeus, 1707-1778” (November 13-14) features the author’s own copy of Systema Naturae (courtesy of the Swedish Embassy), with illustrations by Georg Dionysius Ehret. At the evening reception, the Biodiversity Heritage Library displayed the online version of the 1758 edition of Systema (from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library) and there was also an appearance by Linnaeus [as envisioned by Hans Odöö].