All posts tagged with missouri-botanical-garden

William Ulate Rodríguez, past Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) Technical Director, died in St. Louis on September 20, 2023. William was a father, a friend, a colleague, and a passionate advocate of using the tools of bioinformatics to better understand life on our planet.

William’s friends and colleagues share their fond memories of his life and work.

“The Librarian’s Nightmare.”

Such is the name given to a delightful and quirky vignette found within a very rare, and very special, orchid book: James Bateman’s The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala ([1837]-1843).

This vignette, the work of caricaturist George Cruikshank, depicts a group of men struggling to lift an enormous book using a pulley system while a harried taskmaster with a megaphone attempts to direct their work and demons dance about with impish glee on the sidelines.

The vignette’s caption, translated from the Greek, reads “a big book is a big evil”.

The scene is a humorous commentary on the massive size of Bateman’s orchid book. At about 30” x 22” and weighing in at over 38 lbs, it is the “largest botanical book ever produced with lithographic plates”.

In February 2016, the Biodiversity Heritage Library set out to digitize over 450,000 pages of field notes. While the BHL had already added some archival material to its collection before this project, the Field Notes Project is BHL’s largest undertaking of digitizing field notes to date.

We finished work on the project May 31, 2018 and are pleased to report that the project team digitized over 517,000 pages of field notes! 

The Field Notes Project collection is now over 400 items strong! We are excited by our progress and to share these field books to the global natural history community. For our feature this month, I would like to highlight some of the unexpected or eye-catching pages our digitization teams have come across so far.