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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Notes from William Brewster: The Evolving Field of Zoology

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...

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HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE ILLUSTRATIONS?

Introduction

My project at the Missouri Botanical Garden focuses on access to illustrations in BHL’s corpus of biodiversity literature. I’ve dipped my toes into the related areas of interface design for digital special collections exhibitions, digital humanities, metadata, social media outreach, and rare books in the course of my studies and work. The possibility for engagement and exploration of cultural heritage in the digital environment is infinitely exhilarating. I am fortunate to be able to dive into these topics while making concrete progress on a project that will serve...

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REFLECTING ON OPEN ACCESS AND CODE4LIB 2017

 

In considering how to consolidate my thoughts from Code4Lib 2017, I spent some time reviewing the pre-conference workshops and the interesting and directly relevant talks from last week. Ultimately, as I am sure many other attendees discovered, I found that the framework of the conference and a lot of our work as library technologists was best examined by Christina Harlow in her keynote “Resistance is Fertile.”1 There were many (many...

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