By Robert Young, Special Collections Librarian

Best known as the Hassler Expedition’s young zoological artist from Provincetown, Blake entered business...

By Robert Young, Special Collections Librarian
On 29 January 1855, Andrew Garrett, a thirty-one-year-old self-trained naturalist living in Hilo, Hawaii, wrote a letter to Louis Agassiz-- who was soliciting contributions of zoological...

This post is part of a series on the collection of ornithologist William Brewster (1851-1919) at the Ernst Mayr Library, written by Elizabeth Meyer, library project assistant. 

A 1907 journal entry finds Brewster...

This post is part of a series on the collection of ornithologist William Brewster (1851-1919) at the Ernst Mayr Library, written by Elizabeth Meyer, library project assistant.

This post was written by Patrick Randall, Community Manager for the IMLS-funded Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literatre (EABL) grant.

The EABL project began in the fall of 2015 and ends in January, 2018. This post discusses the goals of the grant, the role of the Ernst Mayr Library in meeting those goals, and the zoological titles that have been added to the collection of the...

This post is part of a series on the collection of ornithologist William Brewster (1851-1919) at the Ernst Mayr Library, written by Elizabeth Meyer, library project assistant.

“The conditions which govern the singing of birds are a constant puzzle to me,” Brewster wrote in his journal after decades of ornithological study. [1] We have some solid information now about how and why birds make certain sounds [2], but Brewster didn’t know the difference between songs and calls; that sounds can serve to attract mates and declare a...

    This spring I was an intern at the Ernst Mayr Library and Museum of Comparative Zoology Archives of Harvard University.  I worked with Robert Young,  the Special Collections Librarian/archivist. My project taught me how to compose a finding aid from scratch, while bringing together information about multiple collections. In the case of the Hubert Lyman Clark papers, for which I created the finding aid, there were multiple relevant collections accessioned at different times that needed to be synthesized into one document  to successfully...

This post is also published on the Biodiversity Heritage Library blog.

As a part of the Field Notes Project, the Ernst Mayr Library is digitizing the journals, correspondences and photographs of William Brewster (1851-1919), a self-trained ornithologist and specimen curator at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), the first president of the...

     On October 7, 2016, the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) at Harvard University and the recently founded National Institute of...

Illustration on an American Long-eared Owl, from 'Birdcraft', New York: Macmillan Co., 1897. ...

Illustration of the cones and needles of the White Pine (Pinus strobus), from 'A description of the genus Pinus,' by Lambert. London: J. White, 1803-1824....

Moose illustration from 'Our living world; an artistic edition of the Rev. J. G. Wood's Natural history of animate creation', vol. 1, by Wood and Holder. New York :S. Hess, 1885. ...

This post is part of a series on the collection of ornithologist William Brewster (1851-1919) at the Ernst Mayr Library, written by Elizabeth Meyer, library project assistant.

Illustration of ruby-throated hummingbirds, from '...

[written by Bruno Costelini, Science without Borders intern at the Ernst Mayr Library]

Ruth Dixon Turner (1914-2000) was one of the foremost marine scientists of the 20th century. She taught at Harvard but carried out research all over the world, working with wood-boring mollusks, such as shipworms. In the late 1970s after the discovery of hydrothermal vents she was the first woman to dive in the deep submergence vehicle Alvin, which she kept on doing for the next couple of decades.

While going through her papers, housed at the Library, we came across the following...