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Featured Books
    All Featured Books
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    Earth Optimism 2020
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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
  • Tech Blog
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Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts tagged with natural-history

Blog Reel, Campaigns, Earth Optimism 2020

Birds Brought Back from the Brink

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We often think of natural history libraries serving as memorials for lost species, animals like the passenger pigeon and the dodo living on only in books, photos, and illustrations that tell sad cautionary tales of once-abundant populations lost to overhunting or habitat destruction.

However, such records also tell stories of hope, providing valuable resources for modern scientists working to protect threatened wildlife. Since it was founded in 2006, BHL’s historical documents have supported the work of conservationists devoted to saving everything from Caribbean mammals to rare wetland plants. Not only are accessible records that describe the historic ranges, populations, and other characteristics of a species essential for researchers, but they help remind the public of how vibrant historical ecosystems were—and the importance of protecting what is left.

“The real advantage of BHL is keeping our ecological memory intact, and not allowing us to collectively forget how beautiful, wild, and diverse ecosystems of the past were,” wrote historical ecologist Dr. Joshua Drew in a blog post from BHL’s 2020 Earth Optimism campaign. “If we succumb to this collective amnesia, we risk setting our conservation bar too low and allowing the dulling of our natural environments to continue without even recognizing our losses.”

As part of BHL’s Earth Optimism series, we’re sharing the conservation success stories of four bird species, all prominently featured in the BHL collection, whose impending losses were reversed through the efforts of concerned citizens and researchers.

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October 29, 2020byEmily Ellis
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Our Experience Digitising a Rare Book for the Biodiversity Heritage Library

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Recently, we spent three weeks on student placement at Museums Victoria Library and were fortunate enough to be involved with the digitisation of the beautiful title The birds of Norfolk & Lord Howe Islands and the Australasian South Polar quadrant by Gregory M. Mathews. It was an eye-opening experience, making us aware of the patience and attention to detail that is a necessity for book digitisation.

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October 10, 2019byMarina Hunt and Brendan Bachmann
BHL News, Blog Reel, Campaigns, Her Natural History

Coming This March! Her Natural History: A Celebration of Women in Natural History

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This Women’s History Month, we invite you to join us in celebrating women in natural history as part of an international social media campaign produced in collaboration with our partners — Her Natural History: A Celebration of Women in Natural History.

Through social media and blog posts, interactive programming and citizen science opportunities, Her Natural History aims to increase awareness of and information about women in the biodiversity sciences.

The campaign will kick-off with an all-day social media blitz on Friday, 8 March 2019 (International Women’s Day) and continue throughout the month with additional posts and programming, including a Wikipedia Editing Workshop on 13 March. #HerNaturalHistory is also the @iglibraries #LibrariesOfInstagram challenge topic for March.

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February 11, 2019byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, User Stories

Vanity and BHL: Examining Extinction and Rediscovery through Art

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Vanity, an art installation by Joseph Gregory Rossano created for and with the support of the Museum of Glass (MOG) in Tacoma, Washington, tells the story of eleven species and subspecies, presumed extinct, presented through the lens of humanity’s role in their demise. The exhibition features historical accounts detailing each species’ “discovery” (collection date, type locality, collector, scientific illustrations, etc.), humanity’s role in its extinction, and the year it was declared “Extinct”. To produce these species tales, Rossano collaborated with Sandra I. Berríos-Torres, MD. Berríos-Torres served as author of the 11 historical accounts and as Editorial Director of the exhibition catalogue, on behalf of Joseph Gregory Rossano.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library was a crucial resource for Berríos-Torres. Consulting dozens of publications in BHL while conducting research for Vanity, she ultimately cited 16 of them in the historical accounts that were incorporated into the exhibition and catalogue.

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February 7, 2019byGrace Costantino and Sandra I. Berríos Torres, MD
Blog Reel, Featured Books

To Contemplate Without Dread: Nineteenth Century Taxidermy and the Study of Natural History

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Natural history illustrations often aim to show life-like flora and fauna. Depictions of birds poised to take flight, fish swimming upstream, and mammals mid-stride are common in 18th and 19th century zoology and botany publications. What is lost in these often lavish illustrations is a certain truth about the way many naturalists interacted with their objects of study: many species of plant or animal were first encountered not in the wild, but in the display case, in the form of carefully prepared specimens.

One British naturalist, Captain Thomas Brown (1785-1862), made the practical observation that mounted animal specimens allowed naturalists to “contemplate, without dread, the most destructive and furious quadrupeds, and the most noxious reptiles.”

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October 25, 2018byAlexandra K. Carter
Blog Reel, Featured Books

“Abnormal apples” and “proliferous potatoes” – Uncovering the stories behind Kew’s Museum of Economic Botany Collection.

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Economic botany can, in a nutshell (excuse the pun), be described as the use of plants by people. This relationship spans thousands of years and includes both individuals and cultures – making this subject a rich and fascinating link between botany and anthropology. Economic botany collections can essentially be described using the term biocultural.

The Economic Botany Collection at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew holds around 100,000 objects from around the globe. Established as the Museum of Economic Botany by Kew’s first official Director, Sir William Jackson Hooker, in 1847, it was cited as a public repository for ‘all kinds of useful and curious Vegetable Products, which neither the living plants of the Garden nor the specimens in the Herbarium could exhibit’.

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April 26, 2018byJoanna Durant
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Ferrante Imperato: Step Into His Cabinet of Wonders!

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Cabinets of Wonder: What Are They and Why Were They Created?

The term, “cabinet of wonder”, comes from the term “wunderkammer” (literally meaning “wonder chamber”). The tradition of creating cabinets of wonder began during the Renaissance, the period of time between the 14th and 17th centuries.

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March 13, 2017byLaurel Byrnes
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About BHL

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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