Latest BHL Quarterly Report

If you think all we do is digitize books, get ready to be surprised! Besides adding over 700,000 new pages of open access biodiversity literature to our collection in 2013 alone, we’ve launched a new website, celebrated the birth of another regional node – BHL-Africa, grown our consortium by adding the Library of Congress as our 15th member library, published two new iTunes U collections, received two prestigious awards, and hosted our seventh Annual Institutional Council Meeting, just to name a few things!

Learn all about these developments, and see how our project is performing, in the latest BHL Quarterly Report and Newsletter! Stay up to date in the future by subscribing to our quarterly newsletters.

We know you’ll be impressed at the ways we’re inspiring discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge!

Spring 2013 BHL Newsletter

Theodore Roosevelt Memorial at the American Museum of Natural History

In 2012, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), one of BHL’s founding members, celebrated the grand reopening of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial. For three years, the Memorial was closed to the public as part of a 37.5 million dollar renovation plan to re-imagine this permanent exhibit. Theodore Roosevelt, America’s Conservation President, was intimately tied to the museum since its founding in 1869.  This week’s book of the week selection, A Book-lover’s Holidays in the Open (1916) was written by Teddy and affords readers an intimate glimpse inside the mind of one of America’s most fascinating presidents.

The murals depict milestones in TR’s life. (Credits: Amal Chen/The Epoch Times)

The renovation includes a new life-size bronze statue of Theodore Roosevelt and several exhibits charting Roosevelt’s journey from budding naturalist to becoming America’s conservation president. Perhaps, the most exciting for those from the art world is the 2.5 million dollar allocation that went towards the restoration of William Andrew Mackay’s murals of Roosevelt. The murals, recording key moments in the life of Roosevelt greet you at the main entrance and cover a space of over 5,200 feet.

A Book-lover’s Holidays in the Open (1916)

Book Frontispiece

To continue AMNH’s celebration of Roosevelt, we wanted to highlight a book that they digitized for the BHL. As the title of this week’s book suggests, Theodore Roosevelt liked to read books. Correction. This man LOVED to read books. Many in his personal circle have vouched that “Teedie” read at least one book per day, most often finishing said tome before breakfast. This seemingly ambitious reading schedule made Roosevelt the most well-read president alongside, Thomas Jefferson.

As a young boy, Roosevelt was an asthmatic bookworm often confined to his Manhattan family flat. One can almost see him wistfully longing for the outdoors as he escaped city life in  the imaginative world of books. However, it was this deprivation from the natural world that caused him to love the great outdoors all the more. He looked forward to family vacations in upstate New York where he could observe nature’s creatures in all their glory.

As early as age 7, Teddy began to collect specimens and wrote about them in minute detail. He even learned amateur taxidermy around age 12 and began adding specimens to a personal collection that he and his cousins dubbed “Roosevelt’s Natural History Museum.” His father fully supported young Roosevelt’s budding interest, being a nature lover himself. In fact in 1869, Theodore Roosevelt Sr. signed the American Museum of Natural History’s founding charter with other trustees in the parlor of the Roosevelt family home on East 20th Street in New York City. Moreover, the Roosevelt family is deeply connected to AMNH, having served on the Museum’s board for its entire history.

A young naturalist’s journal. Photo Credits: AMNH

With A Book-lover’s Holidays in the Open (1916), you get an eclectic mix of stories, personal anecdotes and Roosevelt’s views about conservation in America. Our favorite excerpt from this book, which defies a cursory summary and warrants a fully digested read,  illustrates Teddy’s internal transformation from a hunter that appreciated nature to a President who became, arguably history’s most influential conservation policy maker. Admittedly, this chunk of text is quite long but,  Teddy’s words are eloquent and if you are hurried at least have a look at the passages in conservation green:

“The westernmost island, we visited was outside the national reservation, and that very morning it had been visited and plundered by a party of eggers. The eggs had been completely cleared from most of the island, gulls and terns had been shot, and the survivors were in a frantic state of excitement. It was a good object-lesson in the need of having reserves, and laws protecting wildlife, and a sufficient number of efficient officers to enforce the laws and protect the reserves. Defenders of the short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things sometimes seek to champion them by saying that “the game belongs to the people.” So it does; and not merely to the people now alive, but to the unborn people. The ”greatest good of the greatest number” applies to the number within the womb of time, compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction. Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wildlife, and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources, are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method.”

Teddy’s Conservation Legacy

Amen Teddy. What an incredible life you led, wearing more hats than one cares to list. Today,  we are remembering Teddy as a Book-Lover, Naturalist, “Wilderness Warrior,” Founder of the U.S National Park System and the Conservation President. He was the guy with the big stick going around speaking softly, almost lovingly into the ears of all Americans, willing them to do great things in the spirit of the common good. In his life he inspired people to embrace conservation by his actions: protecting some 230 million acres, establishing 51 Federal Bird Reservations, 4 National Game Preserves, 150 National Forests, 5 National Parks, and proclaiming 18 National Monuments.

We hope you enjoyed this post. Interested in guest-blogging for BHL? We’d love that! Natural history, biodiversity and conservation topics are especially welcomed. Email us your ideas at [email protected].

He has been dubbed “The Father of Modern Taxonomy,” “The Father of Modern Ecology,” Princeps botanicorum (Prince of Botanists), “The Pliny of the North,” and “The Second Adam.” He is credited with creating the classification schema known as binomial nomenclature, and today, he turns 305 years old. Of course, we’re talking about Carl Linnaeus, and we’re celebrating his birthday with the release of our latest iTunes U collection dedicated to him.

Carl Linnaeus was born May 23rd, 1707, in Småland, Sweden. As evidenced by his later publications, his first and primary passion was botany. At an early age, he took an interest in plants, eventually coming under the tutelage of Johan Rothman, the state doctor of Småland. Linnaeus first learned to classify plants under Rothman’s direction, using the system developed by Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, which, though based on artificial similarities between organisms, nevertheless was the first system to make a clear distinction between genus and species.

In 1728, Linnaeus enrolled at Uppsala University, where he made quick progress in the field of botany and, by only his second year, was himself giving lectures. During these years, Linnaeus began to question Tournefort’s classification system, and thus decided to develop his own. Linnaeus’ system arranged plants according to the number of stamens and pistils each possessed. This new system formed the basis of his work in the critical publication Genera Plantarum (first edition published 1737). A young German botanical draughtsman named Georg Dionys Ehret crafted a visual representation of this system, which Linnaeus included in Genera Plantarum (though without acknowledgement to Ehret). The image represents the earliest illustration of Linnaeus’ classification system for plants.

Ehret’s illustration of Linnaeus’ classification system

Linnaeus continued to revise Genera Plantarum, publishing a total of five editions (fifth edition published 1754). During the years between the publication of the first and fifth editions of this work, Linnaeus also published Species Plantarum (first edition published 1753), which arranged all plants known to him into orders, classes, and genera according to the Genera sexual system. Species Plantarum provided formal, multiple word descriptions in Latin of each species, as well as an additional epithet for easy reference. The combination of the genus and epithet quickly became a popular method by which to refer to a plant species. Species Plantarum is considered the inception of botanical nomenclature, and the use of a consistent naming structure based on the methods presented in Species and Genera was a vital step in the maturation of Linnaeus’ binomial schema.

In 1735, even before the publication of the first edition of Genera Plantarum, Linnaeus published the first edition of Systema Naturae. This first edition outlined Linnaeus’ ideas for the hierarchical arrangement of the natural world, dividing it into the animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms. His classification of the plant kingdom followed the sexual system he presented in Genera. However, it was not until the tenth edition of Systema Naturae that the binomial classification system we so readily associate with Linnaeus came into its own. While Species Plantarum had already established a binomial naming system for plants, the tenth edition of Systema Naturae (published in 1758) organized, for the first time, the animal kingdom according to this system – Kingdom, Class, Order, Genera, and Species. Thus, it represents the beginning of zoological nomenclature and, together with the first edition of Species Plantarum, is considered the starting point of binomial nomenclature.

Today, we highlight Linnaeus’ contributions to science with the release of our newest iTunes U Collection: The Carl Linnaeus Collection. The collection features 13 of Linnaeus’ publications (including the first edition of Species Plantarum, the tenth edition of Systema Naturae, and the fifth edition of Genera Plantarum), as well as two additional items about Carl Linnaeus and his sexual classification system (Carolvs Linnaevs by Edward Lee Greene and New illustration of the sexual system of Carolus von Linnaeus by Robert John Thonrton). You can download all of these titles directly onto your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch for free through iTunes. And, of course, you can download them directly to your computer through the BHL interface.

So Happy Birthday, Carl Linnaeus! Our present to you: Your very own iTunes U collection!

In case you missed our post earlier this week, the Biodiversity Heritage Library is now on iTunes U. From our provider page, you can now download select BHL content through iTunes to your desktop or mobile device, i.e. iPad, iPod touch, and iPhone. And, all for free, of course! We currently have 8 collections available, including:

• Fungus Among Us
• Floral Mania
• Charles Darwin’s Library: Selections*
• Extinct Species
• Rarest of the Rare
• Pillars of Biodiversity
• Biota of Cape Cod
• The Curious and the Bizarre

You can learn more about iTunes U through Apple’s website.

Robert John Thornton was an English physician and botanical writer. After hearing Thomas Martyn’s lectures on botany and Linnaeus, he decided to practice medicine rather than his previously-chosen profession in the church. He worked and lectured in medical botany at Guy’s Hospital in London, and at the end of the eighteenth century began working on his ambitious project New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus von Linnaeus.

New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus von Linnaeus is a three-part work, the third part (Temple of Flora) of which was intended to have seventy folio-sized plates. Work on the plates began in May 1798, and the first plates were engraved by Thomas Medland after paintings by Philip Reinagle. The plates were engraved in aquatint, stipple and line.

The work, unfortunately, proved to be Thornton’s demise. The expense of the project drained his financial assets, and Thornton was unable to generate significant public interest in the work. To save the project and ensure its completion, a public lottery and a dedication within the work to Queen Charlotte, patroness of botany and fine arts, were ventured, but without success. Only thirty-three colored plates were completed between 1798-1807, and Thornton died in destitution.

It is a tragedy that Thornton’s life ended so sadly when his work is now deemed a remarkable masterpiece. We pay him tribute for the incredible achievements of his life and are proud to feature just a few of the stunning illustrations from his creation in this post. You can access New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus von Linnaeus: and the Temple of Flora, or Garden of Nature (1807) on BHL and within the Floral Mania collection of iTunes U, both for free of course! See all of the illustrations from this masterpiece on our Flickr account and tell us which is your favorite.