Biodiversity Heritage Library

BHL at the Northeast Natural History Conference

The weekend looked promising:  a lovely clear Friday night for a drive to Burlington, Vermont, USA from southern New Hampshire to attend the Northeast Natural History Conference (13-15 April 2018).  What could be better than a hotel humming with botanists and zoologists and activities for them?  The conference was packed—five concurrent sessions (often standing room only) and around 140 posters Saturday and Sunday along with workshops (Bat houses anyone?) and demonstrations throughout the weekend.  Students, faculty and naturalists from colleges, universities and...

Read more about BHL at the Northeast Natural History Conference

From ‘Shotgun Ornithology’ to Nature Conservation: Scientific Stories and Data from the Field Notes of William Brewster

 

William Brewster (1851-1919) was a renowned American amateur ornithologist, serving as a co-founder of the American Ornithologists’ Union, the first president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and a curator at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ). As a part of the CLIR-funded BHL Field Notes Project, MCZ has been digitizing Brewster’s journals, diaries, letters, and photographic prints, which are held in Special Collections at the MCZ’s Ernst Mayr Library.

Most of Brewster’s observations are based in New England, where he split his time between...

Read more about From ‘Shotgun Ornithology’ to Nature Conservation: Scientific Stories and Data from the Field Notes of William Brewster

Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL)

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...

Read more about Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL)

PRELIMINARY RECOMMENDATIONS FROM NDSR RESIDENTS

 

Post by Ariadne Rehbein, Katie Mika, Marissa Kings, Pamela McClanahan and Alicia Esquivel

Hello! We’ve been focusing on transforming our research into recommendation outlines that we presented to the BHL Tech Team last week. As we head into the final quarter of our residencies, we’ll be focusing on tweaking these ideas, developing workflows and proofs of concept, and finalizing our recommendations in a Best Practices White Paper by December. For this update, we wanted to give a preview of what some of these recommendations will...

Read more about PRELIMINARY RECOMMENDATIONS FROM NDSR RESIDENTS

Notes from William Brewster: Puzzling out Bird Sounds

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...

Read more about Notes from William Brewster: Puzzling out Bird Sounds