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    All Featured Books
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  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
  • User Stories
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    • Earth Optimism 2020
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Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts tagged with smithsonian-archives

BHL News, Blog Reel, Tech Updates

BHL Adds Functionality Allowing Partners to Upload Crowdsourced Transcriptions of Digitized Archival Materials

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) has added functionality to allow BHL Partners to upload transcriptions in place of the automatically-generated OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for archival materials digitized in BHL. This functionality supports transcriptions generated as part of Partner crowdsourcing projects on Smithsonian Transcription Center, DigiVol, and From the Page.

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July 17, 2019byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Field Note-Worthy: Thousands of Field Notes Now Available in BHL Thanks to the Field Notes Project!

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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! 

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June 28, 2018byAdriana Marroquin
Blog Reel, Featured Books

28,000 Pages about the Sea: Challenges and Solutions for Digitizing the Fowler Collection

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Henry Weed Fowler must have loved fish.

Ichthyology dominated his entire career. He started as a museum assistant at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in 1903. Other experts in his field soon recognized his prolific skill. In 1918, an assistant curator at the Smithsonian, Barton A. Bean, reached out to Fowler (then still an assistant) for help identifying fishes collected by the United States Exploring Expedition. Fowler dove into the work. He delivered a lengthy 750-page manuscript in two years, helping to discover 18 new species of fish in the process.

For reference, the average field book here at the Smithsonian Institution Archives is 110 pages.

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May 3, 2018byCharles Zange
Blog Reel, Featured Books

POBSP, how they did it : when science meets military interest

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In the middle of the Cold War, the Smithsonian Institution embarked on the Pacific Ocean Biological Survey Program (POBSP) to survey U.S. territory islands and atolls dotting the central Pacific Ocean. From 1963 to 1969, researchers sought to inventory the plants and animals present on the islands, observe seasonal variations in numbers and reproduction, and the distribution of pelagic birds. Over the course of the survey, researchers observed approximately 150,000 pelagic birds at sea, banded 1,800,000 birds, and surveyed the flora and fauna of the islands, the most comprehensive study at the time. An incredible amount of data was collected during the POBSP, drastically increasing information available about the ecology of the small islands.

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March 1, 2018byAdriana Marroquin
Blog Reel, Featured Books

From Dayton to Cambridge and Back Again: the field notes of August F. Foerste

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Field notes are well known to be essential, primary material that provide details about collections and expeditions that aren’t found in published material or specimen labels. Field notes can also contain diary entries, poems, and sketches which give insight into the lives of the researchers themselves. And now, we can add the candy preferences of August F. Foerste to those insights.

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December 8, 2017byAdriana Marroquin
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Artist Kumataro Ito Aboard the USS Albatross

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In 1907, the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries—now known as NOAA Fisheries or the National Marine Fisheries Service—embarked on a 2 ½ year research trip to the Philippine and neighboring islands. Of the many research trips conducted on their steamer the USS Albatross, the Philippine expedition resulted in a staggering estimate of 490,000 specimens turned over to the U.S. National Museum, what is now the National Museum of Natural History.

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August 31, 2017byAdriana Marroquin
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Ex. Ex. Marks the Spot: bringing together primary and secondary sources on the United States South Seas Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842

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The United States South Seas Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842 was authorized by Congress in 1836 to observe the Pacific Ocean and South Seas. The four-year voyage — also referred to as the Wilkes Expedition or Ex. Ex. for shorthand — covered an expansive geographic region, including the Pacific Northwest, Fiji Islands, and South America. The expedition was under the command of Lieutenant Charles Wilkes of the Unites States Navy, and the resulting collection is thought to be one of the largest early natural history collections, weighing in at an estimated 40 tons. The collection was transferred to the Smithsonian Institution in 1857 and established what would eventually become the National Museum of Natural History.
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August 10, 2017byAdriana Marroquin
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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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