All posts tagged with new-zealand

Auckland Museum joined the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) in 2018 and currently remains the only organisation in Aotearoa New Zealand contributing to the consortium. During my four years working as a technician and coordinator on the project, and with the help of a volunteer, Brianna Vincent, we have added over 25,000 pages, increasing our library of contributions from three to over 100 biodiversity literature items. These items span from 1790 to 2004, covering over 200 years of biological knowledge, and range from field notebooks and sketches to identification guides, records and proceedings, educational textbooks, plant material, cyanotypes (blueprints), and hand-painted illustrations.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is pleased to welcome the Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira as a new Affiliate. Auckland Museum is BHL’s first partner in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Tracing its roots back to 1852, Auckland Museum was one of New Zealand’s first museums and is regarded as one of the finest in the Southern Hemisphere. Renowned for its collection of Māori and Pacific treasures along with significant natural history resources, the Museum tells the story of New Zealand, its place in the Pacific and its people. It is also a war memorial for the province of Auckland.

The Museum is home to one of New Zealand’s finest heritage research libraries. Serving the Museum since 1867, the Library’s key focus is caring for and providing access to the Museum’s Documentary Heritage collections, including manuscripts, photographs and artwork, ephemera, oral histories, rare books, and serials. The Library’s collections have an overarching focus on the Auckland province and te ao Māori (the Māori world), and its natural history collection strengths include botany, and academic and general-interest works related to the natural sciences.

On 25 August – 1 September 2018, BHL representatives from around the world traveled to Dunedin, New Zealand to attend the joint Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) and Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) conference. Hosted by the Otago Museum and the University of Otago, the conference represented several firsts, including the first joint meeting of these two organizations plus the first SPNHC meeting in the Southern Hemisphere.

With the theme “Collections and Data in an Uncertain World”, the conference was an opportunity for bioinformatics and natural science collections professionals to exchange ideas and expertise as they explored the myriad intersections between collections and the data generated from them. BHL, an institutional member of TDWG, was proud to be a conference partner for this important event.

What do the Scarborough District, tigers, Socieded Cientifica Argentina, Auckland Institute and Museum, birds and the Svjatoj Nos wetlands have in common? Actually not much… …except that they are the newest in-copyright additions to the BHL collection! If you still think that BHL is strictly about legacy literature, think again. Although still a very small portion of our collection, in-copyright titles now total over 400 from 170 licensors. Please see our Permissions page to learn more about the in-copyright content in our collection. Where possible, BHL acquires permission in the form of a signed license agreement from copyright holders to digitize post-1922 publications.