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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
  • Visit BHL
Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts tagged with south-africa

Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Her Natural History

Mary Margaret Smith: Ichthyologist, Artist, and First Director of the JLB Smith Institute of Ichthyology

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The Library at the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity is named for Mary Margaret Smith (née Macdonald), the first Director of the JLB Smith Institute of Ichthyology. Macdonald attended Rhodes University College in Grahamstown from 1934 to 1937. She was awarded her B.Sc. degree in 1936, majoring in physics and chemistry (with distinction), and became a senior demonstrator in the Chemistry Department.

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March 24, 2019bySally Schramm
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Her Natural History

Marjorie Eileen Doris Courtenay-Latimer: Beyond the Coelacanth

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Marjorie Eileen Doris Courtenay-Latimer (1907-2004) is ubiquitously remembered and celebrated for her part in recognising that the large fish trawled by Capt. Hendrik Goosen and the crew of the Nerine in December 1938 was an astonishing find. This was to be identified as the first live coelacanth known to Western science. JLB Smith, the ichthyologist who first described it, named it Latimeria chalumnae after Marjorie, and the Eastern Cape river mouth near which it was found.

Reading the Border Historical Society’s The Coelacanth journal Commemorative edition in honour of Dr Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer (2004) we find a life dedicated to a great deal more that single event. Her contributions to the Eastern Cape town of East London, and to the Museum in particular, were immense.

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March 23, 2019bySally Schramm
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Travels in Southern Africa: William John Burchell

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William John Burchell is credited “with having been the most prolific collector of botanical and zoological specimens.” [1] During a four-year scientific exploration of South Africa, he amassed a collection of over 63,000 specimens. And yet, Burchell’s contributions to science have been largely overlooked. As William Swainson bemoaned, “science must ever regret that one whose powers of mind were so varied…was so signally neglected in his own country.” [2] 2015 marks the 200th anniversary of Burchell’s return to Cape Town following his four-year expedition in South Africa.
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November 19, 2015byGrace Costantino
BHL News, Blog Reel

BHL Africa Report from Internet Archive’s Global Director

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Since it’s initial organization in 2012 and launch in 2013, BHL Africa has been hard at work developing a strategy, framework, and methodology for contributing the valuable biodiversity information held within the node’s participating institutions to BHL.

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August 7, 2014byGrace Costantino
BHL News, Blog Reel

Growing Globally: Digitization Developments in Africa

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On April 15, 2013, during a ceremony hosted at the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) at the Pretoria National Botanical Garden in Pretoria, South Africa, BHL-Africa officially launched as our sixth global node. Working within the BHL consortium, BHL-Africa aims to provide open access to the valuable information held in Africa’s biodiversity institutions.

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July 17, 2014byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Shaping Public Perception of Africa: David Livingstone

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“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

Most of us have heard that famous phrase, uttered by Henry Morton Stanley of the New York Herald upon finding David Livingstone in Ujiji, Tanzania, on November 10, 1871. However, just because you know the phrase doesn’t mean you know the man. Come with us as we explore this legendary explorer and celebrate his birthday!

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March 19, 2013byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, User Stories

BHL Use Case: Facilitating the Study of Mollusca in southern Africa

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Imagine that you live in a developing country and you’re studying a rare species of Mollusca. You need to verify the identity of a species you uncovered while performing some field work, but to do so you need to view a publication from the 1700s. Unfortunately, you do not have access to a library that holds the volume you need. What is a scientist to do?

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January 15, 2013byGrace Costantino
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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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