Deirdre Moore, a graduate student in Harvard’s History of Science Department, spent the summer of 2015  working with the Ernst Mayr Library’s lantern slide collection.   Harvard entomologists William Morton Wheeler (1865-1937),  Charles T. Brues (1879-1955) , ...

By Gwendolyn Henry, EdM, MSLIS

Archivist and Library Assistant

Ernst Mayr Library, Museum of Comparative Zoology

Harvard University

Processing the Alexander Agassiz's Expedition and Other Images Collection (1897-1950 (bulk)), which contains 734 gelatin dry plate glass negatives, 268 film negatives and 13 photographic prints requires several key skills: strong attention to detail, the ability to do research, knowledge of descriptive metadata, and most of all a steady hand.

I started this project in April 2012 with little experience in processing glass...

William Brewster (1851-1919) was a renowned American amateur ornithologist, first president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and a president of the American Ornithologists' Union. He was an avid collector of birds and their nests and eggs, and collected over forty thousand specimens from 1861 until his death in 1919. His collection, bequeathed to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, is considered one of the finest private collections of North American birds ever assembled. Though Brewster collected throughout North America, his collection is especially...

Deep-sea fishes that use glowing lures to capture prey ... fireflies like the ones in your backyard ... jellies from which Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), widely used in molecular & cellular biology, was first isolated ... glowworms that dangle glowing sticky threads to lure and capture prey ... even mushrooms and clams. So many luminescent organisms! Who would have thought!

Come check out the exhibit on Bioluminescence in the sunny lobby of the Northwest Building, 52 Oxford Street. Funded by Library Lab, the three display cases built by HMNH Exhibits staff...