All posts tagged with social-media

If you’re reading this blog, you probably already know that BHL provides free and open access to millions of pages of biodiversity literature.

On April 15, 2013, BHL-Africa officially launched. BHL-Africa’s mission is to provide open access to the valuable biodiversity literature found within African libraries and institutions. The African consortium is hard at work identifying partners throughout the continent to sign an MOU and commit to working towards this noble objective.

I knew I was going to have a good University of Michigan School of Information Alternative Spring Break when my project mentor, Bianca Crowley, told me to meet at the Easter Island head. But that’s just how the Biodiversity Heritage Library rolls. Part of BHL is currently housed in the Smithsonian’s National Museum in Natural History, so on Monday March 4, I purposefully strode through it’s grand doors to begin my weeklong project on creating social media campaigns that would cast a wider net and draw more people to the amazing content that the Biodiversity Heritage Library has online.

In October, 2011, BHL Staff conducted a usability test of the BHL US/UK portal, assessing its functionality and comparing it with that of the BHL-Australia portal. While several recommendations arose from that exercise, two of the most emphatic were a need to improve the BHL search functionality and a desire to make the BHL US/UK portal more aesthetically pleasing.

Several months ago, we introduced a new BHL logo, and to publicize the event, we published a blog post that detailed the various images that BHL Staff Members saw within the abstract lines of our new logo. At the end of the post, we asked our users to share their interpretations of the logo with us as well. Many of you did, and, as promised, we’re sharing those today. We send a special thanks to all of you who shared your thoughts with us, and if our logo inspires other ideas, don’t hesitate to share them by commenting on this blog, sending us a tweet (@BioDivLibrary), or posting on our Facebook wall.

Have you ever been out and about, enjoying the beauty of nature, looked up in a tree, noticed a bird’s nest, and wondered what species of bird made the nest? If so, and if you happen to live in Ohio, or somewhere close to it, we’ve got the book for you: Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio (1886), v.1-2, text by Howard Jones and illustrations by a variety of artists, including Miss Genevieve Estelle Jones, Miss Eliza J. Schulze, Mrs. N. E. Jones, Miss Nellie D. Jacob, Miss Josephine Klippart and Miss Kate Gephart.

If you’ve visited our site in the past few days, or follow our blog, you know that BHL now has a new and improved logo! We have our friends at BHL-Australia to thank for this exciting new development, as our logo is a modified version of their own eye-catching design. Before the BHL-Au logo designer, Simon O’Shea, left the BHL-Au project for a new assignment with Lonely Planet, he contributed his creative talent to adapt his original design for our use. He also provided style guidelines that can help extend the use of the logo globally.