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Happy Butterfly and Hummingbird Day!

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Butterflies are in the Papilionoidea superfamily.
Who hasn’t seen the majestic beauty of a butterfly bouncing through the air or hummingbirds hovering near a feeder? If you haven’t you are surely missing out. Whether you have or haven’t seen them, take the opportunity to learn more about them today on National Butterfly and Hummingbird Day. Spread awareness and observe them in nature or at a zoo.

While I can’t be certain if the holiday existed back in the 1800s, even then people knew butterflies and hummingbirds were special. This enthusiasm resulted in books with beautiful illustrations. One of the more popular ones is John Gould’s A Monograph of the Trochilidæ, or Family of Humming Birds, which you can read more about here.

Did you know there are about 24,000 species of butterflies and representations of butterflies have been found in Egyptian frescoes at Thebes, which are 3,500 years old? Butterflies are fascinating creatures. If you want to learn more about them check out  The butterfly book; a popular guide to a knowledge of the butterflies of North America by William Jacob Holland. While he was still Chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, Holland’s book was published in 1898. This accomplished zoologist and paleontologist was a forward thinker that helped popularize butterflies and moths in the early 20th century.

A photograph of Holland from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History Museum.
Featuring 48 plates of color photography, this book presents many of the butterfly species in the United States. Written with a youthful and amateur collector in mind, the book presents these delicate creatures in a positive light. A goal of Holland’s was to change the perception of butterflies. He quotes Henry Walter Bates’ The Naturalist on the River Amazonsin the introduction which summarizes his goal, “The study of butterflies, -- creatures selected as the types of airiness and frivolity, -- instead of being despised, will someday be valued as one of the most important branches of biological science.”    
Antarctica is the only continent on which no Lepidoptera have been found.

Many of the reproduced photographs of butterflies are from Holland’s own collection. Exceeding 250,000 specimens, he donated his private collection to the Carnegie Museum where the collection has grown and been used at unprecedented levels since access was granted to it in 1985. Holland’s collection continues to serve science, conservation, and education to this day.

Check out images from the The Butterfly Book here.


By Kai Alexis Smith, Marketing Intern, Biodiversity Heritage Library, Fall 2013

Book of the Week: Die Cephalopoden

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This week we are celebrating cephlapods. Not sure what they are? Cephalopods are a group of exclusively marine mollusks that include squid, octopus and nautilus. They are closely related to snails, slugs and clams. Let’s be honest, you might be most familiar with them on your plate.


Cephlopods have short life spans that range from 6 months to 2 years. 


These intelligent but vulnerable invertebrates are fascinating. They are represented in fossil records as long ago as 500 million years. If I had to pick, I’d say squids are my favorite 8-legged species, and not just because this is Squidturday. Squids defend themselves by being agile and fast as well as releasing sepia, often referred to as ink. The sepia creates a smokescreen providing the squid to make a get away. Camouflage is another defense mechanism. They cannot only change the color of their skin but the shape and texture to reflect their surroundings. This is possible through pigment cells on their arms called chromatophores. It doesn’t stop there, certain species can fly out of the water for short distances.

The most well known species of squid popularized in book like Homer’s Odyssey and Jules Verne’s 20,000 leagues Under the Sea is the Giant or Colossal Squid. Not much is known about this squid because it is so rare to find. However, it is known that they live in the deep Atlantic Ocean and can bite with their sharp beaks. Their only predator is the sperm whale. They can reach lengths of up to 60 feet and weight as much as 1,000 pounds. Imagine looking into the soccer ball sized eyes of one of these invertebrates. Scary! 


Image of Carl Chun from Jarhrbuch der Berliner Morgenzeitung, 1900.
Little was known about these creatures in the 1900s. So Carl Chun, a well known German marine biologist with a specialty in cephalopods and plankton, led the German expedition aboard the steamboat Valdivia in 1898 to explore the d
eep sea. He was among a growing fraction of scientist who believed that there was life in the deep sea. Lasting just a year, the trip explored the West Coast of South Africa, the Gulf of Guinea, the Antarctic Sea, and a large portion of the Indian Ocean and collected as many biological samples as possible. The results of the expedition lead to 24 volumes titled Ergebnisse der Deutschen Tiefsee-Expedition auf dem Dampfer "Valdivia" 1898-1899" (Scientific results of the German deep-sea expedition on the steamer "Valdivia" 1898-1899which Die Cephalopoden is apart of. 

BHL's copy of Die Cephalopoden provides much more information on cephalopods and squid. If you don't sprechen deutsch, check out the English translationFrom this expedition, Chun discovered and named a new species of squid, the vampire squid. Its species name,
Vampyroteuthis infernalis, means "vampire squid from hell."


To learn more about the Valdivia expedition, check out the BHL blog post Book of the Week: The Valdivia Expedition.

And if you want to see more beautiful illustrations from Chun’s Die Cephalopoden check out the BHL Flickr set.


By Kai Alexis Smith, Marketing Intern, Biodiversity Heritage Library, Fall 2013


References:
Ferris, Jabr. (2 August 2010). Fact or Fiction: Can a a Squid Fly out of the Water? Scientific American. Retrieved from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=can-squid-fly&sc=WR_20100804

 

Robey, Jason. (25 January 2013). Giant Squid Facts. Top 10 Startling Giant Squid Facts. Discovery. Retrieved from http://blogs.discovery.com/show-news/2013/01/top-10-startling-giant-squid-facts.html


Rodolfo. (19 June 2010). Basic Facts about Cephlapods. OBIS, Ocean Biographic Information System.  retrieved from http://www.iobis.org/node/161


Unknown. (n.d.) Cephalopod Day. Retrieved from http://cephalopodday.tumblr.com/about


Watson, Stephanie. (1 June 2007). How Squid Work.  HowStuffWorks.com. Retrieved from http://science.howstuffworks.com/zoology/marine-life/squid.htm 


GBIF Launches New Web Portal!

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GBIF's new web portal: http://www.gbif.org

We're very excited to share that yesterday, October 9, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) launched their new web portal as part of the 20th meeting of the GBIF Governing Board.  The new portal provides greatly enhanced access to the world's largest database of documented evidence for the distribution of species across the planet.

The scientific meeting was held in Berlin and webcast for the press and public. Tim Hirsch, Senior Program Officer for Engagement, and Tim Robertson, Information Systems Architect, introduced and demonstrated some of the new features now available.  For example, the home page now includes prominent links to information that help "tell the entire GBIF story," including how GBIF, its content-contributing partners, and users are:

  1. Sharing Biodiversity for Reuse;
  2. Providing Evidence for Research and Decisions; and
  3. Collaborating as a Global Community.

You can learn more about all of the new functionality by visiting the new GBIF web portal or watching the webcasts of the launch.


The meeting also included presentations on how GBIF's partners in Colombia and Japan are providing free and open access to information about biodiversity in their own countries.  In the afternoon, the annual GBIF Science Symposium highlighted how researchers throughout the world are using the data mobilized through GBIF's network of data publishers.  The Symposium kicked off with a presentation on climate change and patterns of biodiversity by Miguel Bastos Araújo, winner of the 2013 Ebbe Nielsen Prize.  More information is available in the Symposium brochure and webcast of the event.



Taxonomic research on Southeast Asian land snails

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As part of our regular BHL and Our Users series, we’re pleased to introduce Barna Páll-Gergely, a PhD student in the Department of Biology at Shinshu University in Japan.  Barna has had a lifelong interest in shells and land snails and has graciously agreed to answer some questions about how BHL has impacted his research.

BHL and Our Users: Barna Páll-Gergely


What is your title, institutional affiliation, and area of interest?
I graduated from University of Pécs, a Hungarian university, and am now a PhD student in Japan, at Matsumoto, Shinshu University.  I am interested in the taxonomy and evolution of some land snail groups, mainly from South-east Asia.

How long have you been in your field of study?
I started collecting shells at the age of five, as many of us do.  I then worked on land snails for about 10 years, starting in the secondary school.

When did you first discover BHL?
A museum curator friend of mine showed it to me about two years ago.

What is your opinion of BHL and how has it impacted your research?
It provides wonderful possibilities for taxonomists who need to regularly use the very old literature.  BHL provides access to the kind of literature which can often be found only in large, old museum libraries. I also have access to recent papers because I am studying in a Japanese University, but without BHL I would be in big trouble with accessing the old sources.

How often do you use BHL?
I have to check some things almost every day, and during the literature search period (when I start working on a new taxonomic group), I use it practically all day.

How do you usually use BHL (read the titles online/download whole PDFs/Select Pages to Download for a custom PDF/etc.)
I usually download whole publications for my "literature collection", and at the same time I produce smaller pdf files with the information I need for a specific subject. It is easier to handle smaller files when I just need to check something such as the exact page number of a citation.

What are your favorite features/services on BHL?
I can search for scientific names, and people’s names. This is a very big help.

When I started to deal with the land snail family Plectopylidae, I just typed "plectopylis" into the search field and I could read and download many old literature. Without this possibility (scientific or authors name as a search option) finding all relevant literature would have taken maybe two times longer, and more importantly, there would have been a risk of overlooking some sources.  This was very helpful while I was working with my colleagues on the the description of new species and subspecies shown in the image below.

New species and subspecies of the land snail family Plectopylidae from China
and Vietnam (Páll-Gergely & Hunyadi, 2013). This family was neglected
since the beginning of the 20th Century
.


If you could change one thing about BHL, what would it be, or what developmental aspect would you like the BHL team to focus on next?
In many cases the plates of figures and the blank pages in-between appear marked as "text" on the left-hand navigation menu.  It would be great to enumerate them. The other thing is that selecting pages of a single publication and finding the plates at the end of each volume takes a long time. Sometimes it would be more user-friendly to provide a way to automatically group these together for download.
Godwin-Austen, H.H. 1917 Zoological
results of the Abor Expedition, 1911–12.
XLVII Mollusca, VII. Cyclophoridae
(in part) Records of the Indian Museum 8:
493—580. 
http://biodiversitylibrary.org
/item/41753#pag e/677/mode/1up

If you had to choose one title/item in BHL that has most impacted your research, or one item that you prefer above any other in BHL, what would it be and why?
There are many relevant sources I like, for example I am really fascinated by monographs like Kobelt’s Cyclophoridae or the Mollusca of India  by Godwin-Austen. On the other hand, discovering something unusual, or let’s say, "funny" is always a good moment.  My actual favourite is a part in Godwin-Austen’s "Zoological results of the Abor Expedition" (1917), after the description of Rhaphaulus miriensis: "After getting as far as writing the above description I left my work room for lunch, leaving the shell on a slide resting on plasticine. On taking up work again I found it crushed. Thus one of the most interesting shells found recently on the Eastern Frontier has to be rediscovered."

Literature mentioned:
Kobelt W. 1902 Das Tierreich. Mollusca: Cyclophoridae R. Friedländer und Sohn, Berlin 662pp.

Godwin-Austen, H.H. 1882–1920 Land and Freshwater Mollusca of India, including South Arabia, Baluchistan, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Nepal, Burma, Pegu, Tenasserim, Malaya Peninsula, Ceylon and other islands of the Indian Ocean; Supplementary to Masers Theobald and Hanley's Conchologica Indica Taylor and Francis, London, 257pp, 442pp.

Godwin-Austen, H.H. 1917 Zoological results of the Abor Expedition, 1911–12. XLVII Mollusca, VII. Cyclophoridae (in part) Records of the Indian Museum 8: 493—580.

Páll-Gergely, B. & Hunyadi, A. (2013): The family Plectopylidae Möllendorff 1898 in China (Gastropoda, Pulmonata). — Archiv für Molluskenkunde 142 (1): 1–66.



National Fossil Day : Eurypterus remipes

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Do you know your state flower or bird? What about your state fossil? It is okay if you know the first two and not the third. Many don't know their state fossil. There's no better time to discover it than today -- National Fossil Day.


Eurypterus could swim as fast as 9.8 to 13 feet per second, which is slightly faster than a sea otter or sea turtle.

The state of New York has a pretty amazing fossil. It's Eurypterus remipes also known as the giant sea scorpion. They existed over 400 million years ago and thrived in warm, shallow marine environments in the Middle and Late Paleozoic. This extinct relative of the modern king crab was adopted as the State fossil in 1984. The species designation "remipes" is from Latin meaning "oar" and "foot. What I find especially intriguing about them is that they are one of the first animal groups to venture from sea to land. 

This is a comparison of an average adult human male 5.6 ft with the average Eurypterus remipes length 7.9 inches and the largest known Eurypterus remipes fossil 4 feet 3 inches. Image from Wikipedia.

Eurypterus are the most commonly found genus fossil of eurypterids because during the Silurian period when the second super continent was being formed, they rapidly colonized Euramerica. This invasive species became the dominant eurypterid. Eurypterus was both a predator and hunter. While it is not entirely known what they dined on, sources speculate that they had a healthy diet of trilobites, cephalopods, and worms. 

The largest  Eurypterus remipes fossil ever found was 4 foot 3 inches long that is more than half of the height of a average human man which is 5 foot 6 inches. You can see the specimen on display at the Paleontological Research Institution in Ithaca, New York. 

Rev. H. N. Hutchinson writes about giant species that no longer exist in Extinct monsters and creatures of other days : a popular account of some of the larger forms of ancient animal life.  J. Smit, Alice B. Woodward, J. Green, Charles Knight, and others bring them to life through detailed illustrations. In this book, you can also learn about sea lizard, fish lizards, giant sloths, mastodons, great sea serpents, and the dragons of old time … dinosaurs.

Hutchinson’s excitement can be felt through his writing as he describes these long gone species. Here Hutchinson talks about the sea scorpion species, “What curious animals they must have been, using the same limbs for walking, holding their prey, and eating!”


Adult Eurypterus migrated en masse to shore areas in order to mate, lay eggs, and molt. Image from Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.

Check out the beautiful illustrations from the book here.

Also, learn all about fossils at the National Museum of Natural History's FossiLab here.

By Kai Alexis Smith, Marketing Intern, Biodiversity Heritage Library, Fall 2013


References:
Knight, PhD.,  Graham. (n.d.). The story of one man's plight to make fossils swim.  Retrieved from http://gknight.tripod.com/

Merck, Jr., John W. (31 October 2007). Eurypterids, arachnids, and the arthropod invasion of the land. University of Maryland. Retrieve from http://www.geol.umd.edu/~jmerck/bsci392/lecture25/lecture25.html

Share, Dr. Jack. (31 May 2012). The Eurypterid "Eurypterus remipes" is the Official Fossil of the State of New York: Part I - Evolution, Phylogeny, Morphology and Tectonics. Retrieved from http://written-in-stone-seen-through-my-lens.blogspot.com/2012/05/eurypterus-remipes-official-fossil-of.html

Share, Dr. Jack. (29 June 2012). The Eurypterid "Eurypterus remipes" is the Official Fossil of the State of New York: Part III - The R.A. Langheinrich Museum of Paleontology in Eastern Central New York. Retrieved from http://written-in-stone-seen-through-my-lens.blogspot.com/2012/06/eurypterid-eurypterus-remipes-is_29.html

Unknown. (n.d.). Eurypterus remipes NPL4415. Texas Natural Science Center: Non-vertebrate Paleontology, The University of Texas. Retrieved from http://www.utexas.edu/tmm/npl/exhibits/eurypterus.html


Unknown. (27 April 2009). New York State Fossil - Eurypterus Remipes. New York State Library. Retrieved from http://www.nysl.nysed.gov/emblems/fossil.htm

Art of Life Team Holds 2nd Face to Face Meeting in St. Louis, Missouri

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Pictured left to right:  Rob Guralnick, Mike Lichtenberg, Kyle Jaebker, Trish Rose-Sandler, Guarav Vaidya, Joel Richard, Doug Holland, William Ulate.  Not pictured:  Chris Freeland, Mike Blomberg, Chuck Miller.
The NEH-funded Art of Life project recently held its second face to face meeting November 2013 in St. Louis, Missouri.  Institutions represented were from the Missouri Botanical Garden (MOBOT), Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), the University of Colorado Boulder (CU-Boulder); Washington University, St Louis (WUSTL), and Smithsonian Institution Libraries (SIL).

The team focused primarily on how to bring the algorithm work to a close.  The IMA developed four algorithms for identifying which pages in the BHL corpus contain images.  Those algorithms were run across a gold standard set of 40k pages to determine their accuracy and performance.  Two of the four algorithms were deemed to be useful (accuracy ratings were above 80%).  Currently, an environment is being established to enable efficient processing of those two algorithms across the entire corpus of 40+ million pages.  There was also discussion on how to refine the functionality of the Macaw tool which will be used to broadly classify the page images into groups such as illustrations, photographs, diagrams/tables, and maps.  Further work on the schema included efforts to create an application profile based on VRA Core and Darwin Core element sets.   Finally, the team wrapped up the meeting by investigating bulk uploads of large numbers of images to Flickr and Wikimedia Commons as well as how to then extract the resulting crowdsourced metadata back into the BHL portal.

Notes and action items from the meeting can be found on the Art of Life site  http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Art+of+Life.

Pictured left to right:  Kyle Jaebker, Joel Richard, Mike Lichtenberg,
Mike Blomberg, William Ulate, Doug Holland, Guarav Vaidya, Chris Freeland. 
Not pictured:  Chuck Miller, Rob Guralnick

Questions about the project’s goals, progress, and technology can be directed to Principal Investigator, Trish Rose-Sandler at trish.rose-sandler [at] mobot.org.  The Art of Life project runs from May 1, 2012 through April 30, 2014 and is generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.


Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this blog post do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.




The Collector Connection: organizations and the individual collectors who shaped them

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This is the first of a joint blog series by the Field Book Project (FBP) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), showcasing examples of digital connections between collectors, field book catalog records, and the resulting publications of collecting events.

Over the summer the Field Book Project and Biodiversity Heritage Library examined some of the fascinating stories and natural history documentation that resulted from major expeditions. In the past, expeditions were the best way to expediently collect in many regions of the world.  Expeditions still occur today, but they were far more common before the advent of major changes in transportation. Expeditions tend to generate great stories; the mix of personalities, challenges, and exotic locations seem to make it inevitable.  For much of the nineteenth century, expeditions were often organized as needed; they could be heavily influenced by the temperaments of the people leading them.  Strong personalities among the leaders sometimes led to serious conflicts (curious to learn more?  Check out the US Geological Survey’s (USGS) biography on John Wesley Powell, the Survey’s second director, and its discussion of the Powell, Hayden, King, and Wheeler Surveys).  These conflicts and the US government’s growing need for more consistent information about its natural resources eventually led to fundamental changes in the way collecting was completed.  Eventually the US federal government established organizations like the US Bureau of Fisheries, US Geological Survey, US Biological Survey whose primary purpose was to routinely collect, document, and eventually oversee some of the nation’s natural resources.

These organizations and their first collectors often involve great stories, but also provide wonderful examples of the types of field work documented.  Additionally, their efforts were for the United States’s benefit, and the resulting reports and publications are now available through resources like the Biodiversity Heritage Library.  This new blog series is a chance to highlight the different types of collectors that formed these organizations.

United States Biological Survey (USBS)
The first story highlights the beginnings of the US Biological Survey (USBS), originally formed by C. Hart Merriam under the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).  The story forms around two individuals of note—C. Hart Merriam (first chief of USBS) and Vernon Bailey (USBS’s first major specimen collector and naturalist).  These individuals each had unique ways of coming to their field of study, method of work, and differing output, but each was an important contributor to their discipline.  Their catalog records and publications are also available through FBP and BHL (see content links below).
US Biological Survey staff, including Vernon O. Bailey and C. Hart Merriam, 1919.
C. Hart Merriam was a biologist, whose work at the end of the 19th century was instrumental in the emerging field of ecology. His field work and affiliation with the USDA led to his "life zones" concept. In 1885 he was chosen to head the Section of Economic Ornithology in the USDA.  His vision for the section eventually shifted its focus from only birds to include mammals.  By 1896 it became the USBS, later merging with other federal entities to form the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

In 1883, C. Hart Merriam began corresponding with a young man in Minnesota with an interest in collecting, named Vernon Bailey.  This relationship developed over the decades, and proved an important influence on the shaping and growth of the USBS.   Merriam had a strong educational background in science and was well established in the USDA.  But for the USBS to develop, he needed people in the field.  Bailey did not have a formal education in the sciences, but showed a natural aptitude for collecting that Merriam mentored through their correspondence.   In 1885, Bailey began sending collections to Merriam, and in 1887, Merriam hired Bailey as the first field agent for Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy (what would become USBS).  Bailey went on to collect for over 50 years, and became the first and only chief field naturalist of the USBS in 1890, a position he held until his death in 1933.
Florence Merriam Bailey, taken shortly after her wedding, March 1900.  Smithsonian Institution Archives.  SIA 007267, Box 2, Folder 14. 
Their relationship proved important on a personal level as well.  During one of Bailey’s visits to Washington, DC, he stayed at Merriam’s home. This provided a chance to meet Merriam’s sister, Florence Merriam Bailey, who was a distinguished naturalist in her own right. Vernon and Florence would marry in 1899.  Throughout their marriage they completed field work together and co-wrote natural sciences publications.

Perhaps the best way to see how these individuals’ styles of work and interests differed, is to examine their field books and publications.

Field Books from the Field Book Project:
Publications at Biodiversity Heritage Library:
We invite you to check out our next post, and find out more the background of these fascinating individuals, organizations, and how you can learn more about their research online.

By Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project, with contributions from Bianca Crowley, BHL Collections Coordinator

Ursus maritimus: A Shining Star in the North Pole

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As part of BHL's Winter Appeal, we'll be highlighting some of the amazing species that are especially well-adapted to cold, wintery climes as well as those that often come to mind as we celebrate the winter holidays.  Each post will include images, facts and sometimes even stories drawn from the pages of the open access literature in BHL.  The ongoing growth of BHL is supported in part by our dedicated patrons whose gifts we depend on for the the digitization of additional literature, technical development of the program, and improvement of data curation.  We hope you'll consider donating this holiday season!

Ursus maritimus
Imagine being out in a quiet, cold landscape with almost nothing around for miles except for the ice and sea.  In this vast expanse of calm and quiet, you might either wander across the ice in search of a meal or even dive down into the freezing cold waters.  Either way, you would remain quite comfortably warm.  Thus is one of the advantages possessed by Ursus maritimus for surviving in this challenging environment.  A thick coat of fur and insulating layer of fat provide warmth and the distinctive white coloring of the coat serves as excellent camouflage when stalking prey.  A long neck and relatively narrow skull for the species provides the aptly-named "sea bear" with a streamlined figure excellent for swimming.

Wild Life of the World, v.2.  London, F. Warne and Co., 1916.
http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/21738961#page/329/mode/1up 
Commonly known as the polar bear, Ursus maritimus actually only occurs in one of the poles--the North Pole.  The vast, ice-covered ocean known as the Arctic actually has etymological roots in the ancient Greek word, ἄρκτος, meaning bear.  Antarctic, therefore implying "no bears."

The Quadrupeds of North America.  New York, V.G. Audubon, 1851-54.
http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/34896849#page/369/mode/1up 
When we consider the growing concerns about the effects of climate change on places like the Arctic, polar bears are one of the iconic species that immediately come to mind for many of us.  How might they fare over the next decades?  Despite all of their physical advantages and their placement as an apex predator, polar bear populations have seen recent declines and are already considered a vulnerable species by the IUCN.  Some of the biggest threats facing polar bears are the melting ice cap, hunting, and human development in the area, including oil spills and other negative impacts on the environs.

Yet even before climate change was a prominent topic in science and the news, polar bears held a special place in the public's imagination.  Tales of exaggerated ferocity were plenty.  One especially eyebrow-raising account tells of the polar bear's invariable habit of charging at any man encountered.  While today we know that polar bears have been known to attack humans they are just, if not more likely, to avoid such encounters, yet this story goes on to insist that not only do they inevitably charge, they can just as inevitably be tricked into grabbing weapons and committing suicide with them.  Polar bears were undoubtedly less studied and therefore not as well understood in 1861, yet even so the author seems barely able to contain his bemusement at the extraordinary claims of this "eye witness." Today, hunting bans now help to protect this magnificent species.  Groups like BHL and our partners EOL work hard to make sure that scientists and others have access to important information about the species, its habitat and behavior so informed conservation decisions can be made.

The polar bear is documented in over 1,200 pages of open access literature made available through the Biodiversity Heritage Library.  BHL relies on donations from individuals to support scanning of the biodiversity literature held in some of the world's most renowned natural history and botanical libraries.  To learn more about how your donation supports the continued growth of BHL, please visit http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs181/1103622715135/archive/1115465985290.html.  We hope you'll consider making a contribution today!



Basionyms, Synonyms, Authorities: Tracking the Names of Macro- and Micro Algae Through Time

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As part of our BHL & Our Users series, we recently caught up with Dr. Roberta Cowan, a specialist in Phycology (taxonomy) and information management. Over the last 19 years, Dr. Cowan has been actively involved in nomenclatural work, notably for Australian algal species.  Dr. Cowan was kind enough to provide some background on her work and the role BHL has played in making that work both quicker and easier over the years.

Roberta Cowan, PhD 
Dr. Cowan collecting on Whidbey Island,
Washington State 
In the 1980s a number of countries had nomenclatural plant databases. There was the famous Index Kewensis from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew  and the Gray Cards from the Harvard University Herbaria. In Australia the Australian Plant Name Index (APNI) was being prepared. In the early 1990s proposals were put forward to the Australian Government to create a database for the marine macroalgae (Australian Marine Algal Name Index, AMANI) and the freshwater algae. Later the marine microalgae were included in AMANI. All of this information is now being updated and transferred to the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA).

I began work on AMANI in 1994. At that time, in order to check the accuracy of information regarding binomials cited in literature about Australian algae the original literature had to be sourced via the inter-library loan system. By definition much of the literature was contained in monographs and journal runs that were considered rare by the lending library. This invariably meant that the item was not available for photo-copying. Often the full bibliographic details for original literature was not entirely clear and so a ‘catch 22’ situation occurred in that an item may well be sourced to a particular library but could not be copied until the full bibliographic detail was supplied. The detail could only be supplied by accessing the item. Access to the item therefore had to wait until I could travel to the lending library. This meant waiting until travel to the libraries on the other side of Australia--or the other side of the planet--could be afforded.

In 2007, with the founding of the Biodiversity Heritage Library the problems of access and the problems of confirming bibliographic details became increasingly rare. My work changed from submitting inter-library loan forms and waiting for weeks for a requested item to arrive to searching BHL, selecting the item for download, filling in the information: title, author, keywords and waiting a very short time for the pdf to appear via a link in an email.

I am presently editing the algal data relevant to the nomenclature of all names cited in Australian taxonomic literature and all taxonomic literature citing Australian algal names for the Atlas of Living Australia. BHL is one of my most important tools.

Book of the Week: Malacozoaires, ou, Animaux mollusques

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There are approximately 100,000 species 
of molluscs.
Have you ever collected seashells from the sea shore? Ever wonder where they come from or the former inhabitants? Well, they come from Molluscs. Molluscs are invertebrates that include squid, octopuses, cuttlefish, nudibranchs, snails, slugs, limpets, sea hares, mussels, clams, oysters, scallops, and other lesser known creatures.

Molluscs, belong to the phylum Mollusca, a major division of invertebrates with over 100,000 species, second to Arthropods. Their ability to survive is inspiring. They can be found at all latitudes and in both tropical and temperate regions. There are generally 10 recognized classes of molluscs: Aplacophora, Bivalvia, Cephalopoda, Polyplacophora, Gastropoda, Monoplacophora, Pleistomollusca, Polyplacophora, Rostroconchia, Scaphopoda, and Helcionelloida. Rostroconchia and Helcionelloida are both extinct.

Aplacophora and Monoplacophora are only found in the deep sea. The most diverse class is the Gastropods, which include slugs, sea butterflies, conchs, oyster borers, coweries, and snails. Gastropods account for more than a third of all living molluscs and there are between 60,000 and 80,000 living species. Class Cephalopoda including squid, cuttlefish, and octopuses are among the neurologically most advanced of all invertebrates. All Molluscs produce eggs.


Anatomy of a Bivalve Shell Image: Merriam-Webster's Visual Dictionary Online 

Molluscs are distinguished by their anatomy, which generally consist of a head-foot and visceral mass. They secrete a hard shell that covers and protects the visceral mass (area that contains the internal organs) and mantle, a layer of epidermal soft tissue that covers the visceral mass. This calcium shell protects them from harsh environments and predators. The nervous system of the Mollusc is similar with two nerve cords. The exception is Bivalvia, which has three. In addition, their body structures range in a variety of ways. It is difficult to apply one characteristic to all classes of Molluscs. Aplacophorans are the only species that do not have a well-developed foot.

Some molluscs don't have a head.

As mentioned earlier, the shell is created by the protein conchiolin secreted from the mantle. The shell consists of three layers: periostracum (outer layer) of organic matter, mainly conchiolin; a middle layer of columnar calcite; and an inner layer of laminated calcite, often times nacreous also known as mother of pearl. The first two layers also contain chitin, a derivative of glucose found in the natural world.

Published between 1829-1830, Malacozoaires, ou, Animaux mollusques (English translation: Malacozoaires, or Shell Fish Animals) was written by French zoologist and anatomist Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, curator and professor of invertebrate zoology at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle and a member of the French Academy of Sciences. De Blainville like many scientists, longed to give order to the natural world. Malacozoaires, ou, Animaux mollusques is the result of this desire. This monograph provides several orders and genera for species studied in France. While there is significantly more information about mollusks today, his book was a start to understanding the unknown. 

If French comes natural to you and vous parlez ou lisez francais, read Malacozoaires, ou, Animaux mollusques.

Check out the beautiful shells from the book at the BHL Flickr here.

By Kai Alexis Smith, Marketing Intern, Biodiversity Heritage Library, Fall 2013


References:
EOL Rapid Response Team (n.d.). Mollusca (Mollusks).Encylopedia of Life. Retrieved from http://eol.org/pages/2195/details

Hayward, PJ (1996). Handbook of the Marine Fauna of North-West Europe. Oxford University Press. p. 484–628.

Porter, S. (2007). "Seawater Chemistry and Early Carbonate Biomineralization". Science 316 (5829): 1302.

Unknown (n.d.). Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville. Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Marie_Ducrotay_de_Blainville

Unknown (n.d.). Mollusca. Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mollusca

Happy Holidays from BHL and Rangifer tarandus!

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As part of BHL's Winter Appeal, we're highlighting some of the amazing species that are especially well-adapted to cold, wintery climes as well as those that often come to mind as we celebrate the winter holidays.  Last week we featured Ursus maritimus, the magnificent apex predator of the Arctic commonly known as the polar bear.  This week, we turn our eyes again to the North Pole to shine the spotlight on a well-known celebrity of  the giving season!

Wild Life of the World: A Descriptive Survey
of the Geographical Distribution of Animals.
London, F Warne and Co, 1916.
http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/21738521
#page/455/mode/1up

Rangifer tarandus
As the holiday season goes into full swing, the festive days of late December bring a dazzling array of familiar images--shiny packages with ribbons and bows, snowy rooftops and fir trees, and of course the ubiquitous Rangifer tarandus.  Whether pulling sleighs or playing games, these antlered animals  feature prominently in decorations throughout the holiday season.  If you've ever watched the holiday cartoons broadcast at this time of year, you could be forgiven for thinking that reindeer are an especially uniform species, intolerant of differences.  But what of reality?  As it turns out, in real life reindeer exhibit a remarkable range of diversity.

Distinguishing them from other deer, reindeer are the only species in which both the male and female grow antlers. Within the species, reindeer display notable variations in size, shape and color.  According to The Animals of World: Brehm's Life of Animals (1895) a comparison of tame and wild reindeer would reveal such differences just in the size and shape of the hooves that one could easily see how they might be considered belonging to separate species.  Antler size and fur coloration are also known to vary in the different regions of the reindeer's circumpolar habitat.  Even within individuals, coloration changes with the seasons, bringing on a more greyish-white hue for the snowy winter months.

Verzameling van uilandsche en zeldzaame vogelen.
Amsterdam, J.C. Sepp, 1772-1781.
http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/11267501#page/199/mode/1up
But sometimes the differences are significant enough to denote a classifiable distinction and today taxonomists recognize several subspecies of reindeer.  For example, Rangifer tarandus groenlandicus, shown above, occurs primarily in Greenland.  Even for those of us not well-versed in scientific names, this shouldn't be surprising with the obvious phonetic similarity between groenlandicus and Greenland.  What many of us will find surprising, though, is that the common name of this subspecies is the "barren-ground caribou" meaning that, yes, caribou are subspecies of reindeer!  Who knew? (Well, undoubtedly some of you did but for those of us more familiar with the animated variety, let us not be ashamed to admit we are duly surprised!)

Other subspecies include the Dawson's caribou (Rangifer tarandus dawsoni) which once roamed the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia and is now presumed extinct.  While some information can still be derived from the DNA extracted from bones, fur and other remains of Dawson's caribou and other extinct species, the vast majority of scientific knowledge on their appearance and behavior is locked in rare or hard to find literature.

The animals of the world. Brehm's life of animals.
Chicago, A. N. Marquis, 1895.
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/37569440

#page/540/mode/1up
Habitat destruction, hunting and predators continue to present threats to wild caribou and reindeer.  In 1983, the US Fish and Wildlife Service listed the subspecies Rangifer tarandus caribou as endangered and advocated to protect its habitat.  Even at the turn of the century, reports of diminishing populations of one of the largest subspecies, Rangifer tarandus fennicus or Finland reindeer, were common.  In one of several such reports, cited in Extinct and vanishing mammals of the Old World (1945), the author laments, "The Finland reindeer is thus very nearly exterminated in the greatest part of its former habitat and it looks almost as a bitter irony of fate that it should not be recognized and discerned as a separate race before it was in so imminent danger of becoming entirely extinct..."

While we can't bring the species and subspecies that have gone extinct, we can preserve our knowledge of them to help avoid future extinctions. By making this knowledge widely available, we can become better stewards to those species that are still here and especially to those recovering from diminished populations.

The BHL currently provides access to over 42 million pages and over 87,000 images and is changing the face of research methodology.  Scientists around the world are using BHL to identify and classify species, facilitate further scientific research, and support conservation efforts to help prevent future extinctions.  The ongoing growth of BHL is supported in part by our dedicated patrons whose gifts support the digitization of additional literature, technical development of the program, and improvement of data curation.  We hope you'll take a moment to review how your donation can be put to work and will consider supporting BHL this holiday season!
The wild beasts of the world.
London, T.C & E.C. Jack, 1909
http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/19080406#page/157/mode/1up

Thank you and Happy Holidays!



More than just a legacy: Let's look at the post-1922 literature in BHL

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By Adriana Marroquin and Robin Everly

It's no secret that the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a top-notch resource for legacy biodiversity publications.  The current U.S. copyright law states that if a title was published over 90 years ago, that title has entered the public domain and is out of copyright.  This allows the BHL to digitize and provide access to an astounding number of volumes published before 1923.  However, that 1923 cut-off isn't the end-all, be-all for BHL.  An often overlooked aspect of the portal is that it provides access to several post-1922 titles.

There are four main reasons a post-1922 title would be available on BHL: it's a U.S. federal government publication, its copyright has expired (relevant to the murky 1923-1963 time period of copyright renewal), it's been made available via the Internet Archive, or the BHL has obtained permission from a third-party publisher to digitize the title.  Additionally, many BHL partners have digitized titles published by their institutions.  In the case of permissions contracts, they may include a cut-off date, e.g., only pre-2004 volumes may be digitized, a practice often used with subscription-based databases.  For more information about third-party permissions and copyright, check out the BHL Permissions and Licensing & Copyright pages.

In this post, we'll highlight a few of our favorite contemporary titles, but keep in mind they are just a small portion of what is available.

A page from The Boston Park Rangers Nature Book
highlighting Myotis lucifungus, or little brown bat.
http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/38658209

Boston Park Rangers Nature Book
The Boston Parks and Recreation Department


Digitized by the Boston Public Library, this short pamphlet offers a look into the different animals and plants found in Boston's network of parks, often referred to as the Emerald Necklace.  Yes, it is a coloring book, but what better way to interest children in urban ecology and their local neighborhood wildlife?  The Boston Park Rangers Nature Book is ready to be printed and shared.  Fair warning though: the maze where you help a red-tailed hawk catch a mouse has already been completed.





A page from Fieldiana: Geology series showing
a reconstruction of Parasuarolophus cyrocristatus.  
http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/4264754 
Fieldiana: ZoologyGeology, and Botany series
The Field Museum of Natural History

Fieldiana is a perfect example of a BHL partner providing access to one of its best known publications.    This Field Museum title has been through a few title changes (currently it is published under two series: Anthropology, and Earth & Life Sciences), and most can be accessed through BHL.  The Botany and Geology series are available up to their respective 2005 volumes.  The Zoological series, on the other hand, is available up to volume 114 of the new series, published in 2008.  That means there's over 100 years of material available to users!  This includes access to the Flora of Peru (1936) and Tropical American Plants (1961-1975).



The Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature
International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN)

ICZN is responsible for the uniform system used for zoological nomenclature around the world.  It goes without saying that keeping up with their rulings is imperative.  Whether in search of a proposal to reject new names from a particular publication or a recommended change in procedure for the electronic age, users can refer to the quarterly Bulletin all the way through 2007.  The ICZN has also given permission for other titles, such as the Official Lists and Indexes of Names and Works in Zoology.  Access to this material can be attributed to the ICZN's home base: the Natural History Museum, London.

The Japanese Flowering Cherry Trees of Washington, D.C.
U.S. National Arboretum Contribution Series

The U.S. National Arboretum Contributions series is comprised of eight specialty publications beginning in 1953 and ending in 1995.  All are horticultural in nature and many are about research on the grounds of the Arboretum.  All are available on BHL.  One that might appeal to a wider readership is about how the cherry trees came to Washington.  It tells the story of how the now famous and much anticipated cherry trees came to be planted around the tidal basin in West Potomac Park in 1912.  It's a fascinating tale of international diplomacy with details on how the first shipment of trees had to be destroyed after their arrival.  Part history lesson and part insight as to why the U.S. needed to develop an effective monitoring system for foreign plant introduction, which it eventually did.

Cover of The Japanese Flowering
Cherry Trees of Washington, D.C.
http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/39103940  
Two photos of cherry trees along the
tidal basin in 1938 and mid-1940's.
http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/39103904



The Swedish Museum of Natural History

The publication began in 1975 and is useful to anyone with a taxonomic interest in the family Asteraceae, commonly known as the daisy or sunflower family.  Asteraceae is a large plant family with 23,000 accepted species spread across 1,620 genera.  Bertil Nordenstam, who recently retired as editor, is responsible for publishing the journal in its improved form, with announcements and lists of types, research articles and comprehensive works.  A nice history of the publication can be found in Volume 50 of the publication.  Currently, the print publication is held by 34 libraries worldwide, with a print distribution of approximately 600 copies.  Providing it electronically through BHL allows for more researchers and libraries to learn about the publication and have access.

Cover of the Compositae Newsletter Number 50 (2012)
http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/41205936

We hope these few examples have inspired you to explore BHL for more recently published works.  Providing both pre- and post-1923 titles to a worldwide audience is all part of making BHL a truly global comprehensive resource in biodiversity literature.  So make sure to explore BHL yourself for modern titles.  You never know what you'll find!


Hummingbirds and Harlequins

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By Rick Wright
   
Beauty can be too much for words. So it is with the charm of what many consider the loveliest of the world’s birds, the hummingbirds: Overcome by the dazzling colors of those first tiny skins, early European naturalists reached to the limits of their vocabularies to describe them. The result, nearly five centuries after the first specimens were brought back from a then truly New World, is a large set of remarkably evocative names, hillstars and woodstars, helmetcrests and plumeleteers, jacobins and incas, metaltails and thornbills, emeralds and sapphires and topazes and rubies.


The birds, of course, are every bit as fantastic as their monikers. The 1907 edition of The Americana, the authoritative North American encyclopedia of its day, gave its readers a glimpse into the vast variety of color and adornment so typical of this large family, from the Horned Sungem to the Hyacinth Visorbearer. One of the thirteen birds shown on this appealing plate, however, is conspicuously absent from any modern list of hummingbirds: the extraordinarily colored Harlequin Hummingbird.

That bird was first made known to science a century and a quarter before it was depicted in The Americana. In 1782, John Latham described his new species from a specimen in the collections of the British Museum.


Unfortunately, Latham notes, that unique skin had “no history annexed to it,” and so he was unable to offer any information about the range or the habits of the species he named the Harlequin Humming-Bird.

Five years later, Latham came across another source of information, a drawing by the famous watercolorist Thomas Davies, who had been in the West Indies in 1786. Davies’s rendering of the bird differs from the British Museum specimen, Latham tells us, in its greater length—five inches rather than four and a half—and in the presence of a narrow band of blue green on the back of the head, a character well shown by Latham’s plate in the Supplement to his General Synopsis of Birds.
   


That image and the accompanying description provided the “type” for Johann Friedrich Gmelin, who gave the species its rather bland Linnaean label in 1788, Trochilus multicolor. Latham in turn adopted that name for his 1790 Index ornithologicus, where his brief description of the bird could be read to imply that he had seen further specimens, “in some of which there is a blue-green patch below the nape.”

George Shaw, in his Naturalist’s Miscellany the following year, was able to narrow the range of the Harlequin, “among the rarest species of its genus,” to South America, hardly a bold conjecture in the case of a large, colorful hummingbird. Shaw’s account was accompanied by an awkwardly executed plate by Frederick Nodder, painted, Shaw claims, from the British Museum specimen; the telltale turquoise panel on the upper back, however, reveals that Nodder based his work on Davies’s—or, more likely, on Latham’s description of Davies’s sketch.



The Harlequin Hummingbird was painted again, by Sydenham Edwards, for Louis Pierre Vieillot’s 1802 continuation of the Oiseaux dorés, a lavish work begun by Vieillot and his collaborator Jean-Baptiste Audebert, who had died in December 1800. Vieillot claims that Edwards had worked directly from the skin in the British Museum; whether that was true or not, a close look suggests that Edwards was quite familiar with Nodder’s plate, too, from which it differs in omitting the nape patch Latham had noticed in the Davies drawing, a mark Vieillot says is indicative of a “variety” of the true Harlequin.


   
Nearly fifty years after its discovery in a museum drawer, this hummingbird was as mysterious as ever. In 1829, René Primevère Lesson wrote of the oiseau-mouche arlequin that

this bird is known only from the description and figure published by the English ornithologist Latham. That figure, drawn by Sir Edwards, was reproduced by Mr. Vieillot on Plate 69 of his Oiseaux dorés, and we have been obliged to include it in order that we omit none of the species listed on the basis of specimens preserved in collections or known from accurate portraits.
But Lesson had his doubts:
At the same time, this drawing seems to pertain rather to one of the curve-billed hummingbirds, and seems to us to be imprecise; it is only with very great reservations that the species must be admitted to the table of extant straight-billed hummingbirds. It could be, too, that it depicts nothing more than a sunbird, which we suspect even more from the fact that no hummingbird normally displays a similar distribution of solid colors in its plumage.
In 1831, Lesson had his answer. In his Trochilidées, he reported that the colibri arlequin of the British Museum had been examined by a Mr. Stokes,
who writes to us that the bird that served as the type for Latham’s description and for the figure copied by Vieillot was the product of a falsification, which one discovered on dismantling the specimen preserved in the British Museum.
It is a measure of the uncertainty that still obtained in neotropical ornithology—and, perhaps, of the antagonisms that still lingered between French and British naturalists—that William Jardine, two years after the publication of the Trochilidées, could write that
It has been hinted that the specimen in the British Museum was a specimen made up from the feathers of different birds.
Lesson’s debunking (which Jardine cites) was far more than a hint. Jardine notes, however, that Latham, who would live into the year 1837, had been aware of the rumor. In a footnote to the 1822 edition of the General History, Latham writes that
It has been suggested to me, that this is no other than a bird made up by the ingenuity of some whimsical person, who has fabricated it from the feathers of others; but which, by every attention paid to it, I cannot detect.

Jardine included the bird in his own work
with the view of attracting the attention of British naturalists…. If there is a specimen in the British Museum, and a drawing in the possession of General Davis, corresponding and evidently done from an individual of the same species, there will be no doubt of its existence.


“If.”

In preparing his great Monograph of the Trochilidae, John Gould was “at all times favoured … with both information and the loan of specimens” from the collections of the British Museum. Nowhere could he find a skin attesting to the existence of the Harlequin Hummingbird—Lesson’s Mr. Stokes most likely had felt no obligation to reassemble the composite hoax once it was revealed. In relying on Latham, Gould writes, Gmelin had described a new species based on
characters … taken from a plate which must have been drawn from imagination and not from any real specimen.

Indeed, of the 95 hummingbirds Latham included in the revision of his General History, Gould considered only about two-thirds “real species,” the other 30 or more, among them the Harlequin, all “so indefinitely described” as to be unassignable to any known bird.

It seems very unlikely that we will ever know who the ingenious and whimsical creator of Latham’s specimen was, or what bird was depicted in Thomas Davies’s equally mysterious drawing. What is entirely certain, though, is that this is not the only case in the history of “trochidology” where a bird turned out to be something else entirely than what its original discoverers thought or hoped.


Geoffrey Mwachala from the National Museum of Kenya visits BHL at Smithsonian Libraries

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Geoffrey Mwachala
Dr. Geoffrey Mwachala
examining a copy of Victorian Naturalist
Dr. Geoffrey Mwachala, Director, Research and Collection at the National Museum of Kenya, stopped to visit Martin Kalfatovic and Nancy Gwinn while in Washington on other biodiversity and museum collections business at the Smithsonian.

While at Smithsonian Libraries, he was able to visit the scanning facility in the National Museum of Natural History and see some of the BHL digitization operations in action.

Dr. Mwachala is a strong supporter of BHL Africa and the expansion of biodiversity knowledge.

The Collector Connection: US Bureau of Fisheries

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This is the second of a joint blog series by the Field Book Project (FBP) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), showcasing examples of digital connections between collectors, field book catalog records, and the resulting publications of collecting events.

The first post in this series about organizations discussed the nascence of the US Biological Survey. It seems appropriate to follow with the story of the US Bureau of Fisheries. “Why?” you might ask. Simple! These two organizations later merged and formed the US Fish and Wildlife Service! The Bureau was primarily shaped while it was still known as the US Commission of Fisheries. It would become the Bureau in 1903. To understand its development, one must look at the years prior to 1903.

Portrait of Spencer Fullerton Baird, by Bell, William, January 10, 1867, Smithsonian Archives. SIA2004-60740.

In the 1870’s the US saw a noticeable decline in the Southern New England fisheries. The US knew little about the fishing grounds off its own coasts. Spencer F. Baird, a respected naturalist and a Smithsonian secretary, had a background in ichthyology and was approached by Congress about these issues. He recognized an important opportunity to promote the scientific study of the US’s marine natural resources in an effort to help the US economically. In 1871, he convinced Congress to establish the Commission on Fish and Fisheries. He served as the first commissioner. In the Commission’s early years, completing field work was a challenge, since it had no vessels and little funding of its own. Staffing and research (collecting and surveying) was completed in conjunction with the Smithsonian. This is one of the reasons Smithsonian Institution Archives has so many of the organization’s early records. The Commission often had to utilize ships supplied by the Revenue Service and US Navy. It was not until the 1880’s that they were able to procure their own research vessels.

When the Commission finally obtained the funds to acquire their own, they didn’t just go with any ship. They hired builders to design and construct some of the first ships dedicated solely for marine research. Each of these vessels enabled the Bureau to substantially increase their efficiency and research output. Additionally these vessels were used in the field for decades and were pivotal in assuring the quality and quantity of research data the Commission/Bureau could provide. Unlike research completed aboard another agency’s vessel, these were designed for research, and research staff didn’t have to worry about competing missions while at sea. Even the ship’s logbooks demonstrate this vividly. When scientists were aboard another agency’s vessels, their specimen collecting data was usually recorded in a journal separate from the logbook. US Fisheries vessels’ purpose was to enable the research, so the collected information was part of the ship’s logbook contents.

These ships were important tools for the numerous collectors the Commission sent into the field. Unlike Vernon Bailey who both collected and published widely over the years, several of the Commission’s collectors like William W. Welsh, focused on the field work and left the publishing to others. Ship’s logbooks, in their brevity often left little room for recording who did the research/work. Luckily, Commission and Bureau field documentation also included personal field books which document another important part of the Commission’s field work--interviewing local inhabitants for their knowledge of local fishing conditions and good fishing grounds. The field books (such as SIA RU007187) include surprisingly detailed interviews with locals about their lives, work, and personal knowledge of the habitat. Frequently the Commission’s publications are the synopsis of field work. These publications are often most easily located through the name of the vessel on which the staff worked, like the Fish Hawk (1880), Albatross (1883), and Grampus (1885).

We encourage you to take a look at the logbooks from these ships, now available in digital format through the Smithsonian, and compare to their resulting publications available through BHL. Learn more about the interviews completed by Commission staff that augmented knowledge gained by collecting.
R/V Fish Hawk logbook excerpt, August 7, 1880. Smithsonian Institution Archives, RU7184, box 9, folder 3. 

Field book (logbooks) through FBP:

Publications available through BHL:
By Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project, with contributions from Bianca Crowley, BHL Collections Coordinator

My experience as a BHL Intern

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Kai Alexis Smith, Virtual Marketing Intern, Fall 2013

I was the Virtual Marketing Intern at Smithsonian’s Biodiversity Heritage Library in fall 2013. I participated in this internship post graduation because while I have previous experience with social media and marketing from my previous career, this internship provided me experience directly promoting a library collection. Also, while my background and passion is in the arts, I always had and will have a special place in my heart for science, especially biology. For the position, I wrote seven blog posts that highlighted books from the BHL library. I also wrote Facebook and Twitter posts to promote the blog.

After graduating from the Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science program in May 2013, I went to the University of Michigan to complete an Association of Research Libraries Fellowship where I worked on digitizing select items and created an Omeka exhibit for the Leonard B. Willeke collection. I started to wonder how this project would be promoted within the institution as the Omeka exhibit was in anticipation of the complete digital collection of 16,000 items. In August, this interest in promotion grew stronger when I was in Washington, D.C. developing a digitization strategy for vertical files at the National Gallery of Art as the ARLIS/NA Wolfgang Freitag Intern. I incorporated a promotion section in the digitization strategy, as it would be an integral part of discovering the project and spreading the word about its services, if implemented. I also, visited many libraries while in D.C. and part of my inquiries included how each institution promoted their collections and services. Many mentioned different social media platforms and others shared that marketing was centralized within the institution. I realized that while I had previous career experience with social media and marketing, I did not have direct library experience. This internship helped round out my skill set.

During the virtual marketing internship, I had the pleasure of working with Biodiversity Heritage Library Collections Coordinator Bianca Crowley. While many past interns have touted the awesomeness of the badge, which, no doubt having one is, as a virtual intern I did not have the privilege of a Smithsonian badge. However, there were many other benefits. One of the main benefits of this internship was not only the experience, but the opportunity to learn from other experienced Smithsonian Institution librarians. Even though there were setbacks with the government shutdown, Bianca did an amazing job of setting up virtual introductions and an awesome virtual tour of the scanning room. I even got the chance to video chat with President of Smithsonian Libraries Mrs. Nancy Gwinn. I also was able to meet the staff and tour the Cooper-Hewitt Library in person in New York City.

My undergraduate degree is in writing, so this internship helped me return to my roots. I learned and wrote about New York state fossil Eurypterus remipes, hummingbirds and butterflies, molluscs, parasites, cephalopods, reptiles and amphibians, and Austrian zoologist Leopold Joseph Fitzinger and his picture atlas of birds.

In conclusion, for library school students or recent graduates looking for an opportunity to supplement their curriculum, consider Smithsonian’s BHL virtual marketing internship. While you will not get the glitz and glamour of going into the museum every day, you will work with incredible colleagues, learn more about Smithsonian libraries, virtually meet and get advice from future mentors, and create great work that highlights an incredible collection.

Didn’t get a chance to read my posts? Check them out here:

“Book of the Week: Malacozoaires, ou, Animaux mollusques.” December 19, 2013.
http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2013/12/book-of-week-malacozoaires-ou-animaux.html

“Book of the Week: Bilder-atlas zur Wissenschaftlich-populären Naturgeschichte der Vögel in ihren.” December 5, 2013.
http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2013/12/book-of-week-bilder-atlas-zur.html

“Book of the Week: Parasites and parasitosis of the domestic animals: the zoölogy and control of the animal parasites and the pathogenesis and treatment of parasitic diseases.” November 19, 2013.
http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2013/11/book-of-week-parasites-and-parasitosis.html

“Book of the Week: Biologia Centrali-Americana: Reptilia and Batrachia.” October 24, 2013.
http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2013/10/book-of-week-biologia-centrali.html

“National Fossil Day: Eurypterus remipes.” October 16, 2013.
http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2013/10/national-fossil-day-eurypterus-remipes.html

“Book of the Week:  Die Cephalopoden.” October 8, 2013.
http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2013/10/book-of-week-die-cephalopoden.html

“Happy Butterfly and Hummingbird Day!” October 3, 2013.
http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2013/10/happy-butterfly-and-hummingbird-day.html

Happy New Year!

- Kai Alexis Smith, Virtual Marketing Intern, Biodiversity Heritage Library, Fall 2013


While standing on the shoulders of giants...

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Learning lessons from the CITScribe Hackathon participation


Two members of BHL's Technical Advisory Group (TAG), BHL Technical Director William Ulate from Missouri Botanical Garden and Joe deVeer, Head of Technical Services of the Ernst Mayr Library at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard, "virtually" attended the CITSCribe Hackathon in Gainesville, Florida from Dec. 16 to 20, 2013. 

The hackathon was co-organized by iDigBio (www.idigbio.org) and Zooniverse's Notes from Nature Project (www.notesfromnature.org).  Led by the co-organizers Rob Guralnick (University of Colorado, Boulder) and Austin Mast (Florida State University), the objective of the hackathon was to further enable public participation in the online transcription of biodiversity specimen labels and to produce new functionality and interoperability for Zooniverse's Notes from Nature and similar transcription tools.  The event started by focusing on four areas of development, progressively addressed throughout the week: (1) interoperability between public participation tools and biodiversity data systems, (2) transcription quality assessment/quality control (QA/QC) and the reconciliation of replicate transcriptions, (3) integration of optical character recognition (OCR) into the transcription workflow, and (4) user engagement.

The LI LI Hackathon subgroup working on the integration of OCR.
For a while now, the BHL Technical Advisory Group (TAG) has been participating in the events of iDigBio, particularly on the Augmenting OCR Working Group, under Deb Paul and Bryan Heidorn's guidance.  One of our BHL colleagues and TAG members, John Mignault from New York Botanical Garden, also participated last year at iDigBio's previous hackathon which primarily focused on parsing OCR output to standard darwin core.

This time, we had a presentation by Cody Meche, an Agile trainer who gave some useful directions and tips on how to approach our hackathon to use our time as efficiently as possible while following an agile development process.  Alex Thompson, from iDigBio, presented on the digital resources that could allow programmers to run a copy of the web interface of Notes for Nature on their local machines using Vagrant and Virtualbox.  Paul Kimberly also presented the Smithsonian transcription project (transcription.si.edu) and Yonggang Liu talked about iDigBio’s image ingestion tool, useful for getting images into the iDigBio cloud.  Laura Whyte, Director of Citizen Science at Adler Planetarium joined us virtually at the Hackathon to talk about Zooniverse and citizen science.

I also had a chance to present shortly about our approach to OCR and Transcription within our Purposeful Gaming project funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).  Basically, we intended to leverage iDigBio's knowledge while tackling the challenge of improving the existing BHL OCR through Purposeful Gaming.  Our interest was mainly two-fold: on one side we wanted to learn from the amazing cumulative experience and skills that iDigBio comprises and the tools that are being adapted, built and used to generate the OCR and transcribe the text of their specimen labels; a challenge very similar to our own issues with OCR of books and journals in BHL.  On the other hand, we wanted to learn from their workflow definition to improve the OCR generation process, the incorporation of their transcription outputs and the reconciliation of the existing versions into a single one (for example, read about using sequence aligning methods on this recent blogpost by Rob Guralnick), while at the same time taking advantage of the citizen scientists' help in an efficient manner that copes with the scale of the challenge.

High level workflow proposed for the Purposeful Gaming project

Specifically, our short term goals include incorporating recommendations and adapting existing tools developed by many of the participants in the past two hackathons: Jason Best's DarwinScore, Ben W. Brumfield's work on QC for Collaborative (Crowdsourced) Manuscript Transcription, the QA/QC track developments to take outputs from the citizen science transcription products and assure the highest quality end result, are just some among many other outputs and suggestions from these activities that can be incorporated to our process of improving the OCR texts in BHL.  And if you have more ideas, I would definitely like to hear about them...

For more information on the recent CITScribe Event read this iDigBio's blogpostAustin Mast's detailed blog post or consult directly the Hackathon wikipage.  You can access all information and results about iDigBio in their home pageand follow our own BHL developments from the webpage of the Purposeful Gaming project, made possible in part by the Institute for Museum and Library Services [Grant number LG-05-13-0352-13].

William Ulate R.
BHL Global Coordinator and BHL-US/UK Technical Director
Missouri Botanical Garden

Ringing in the New Year with thanks!

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In the US, we set aside time to reflect and give thanks in November as part of the Thanksgiving holiday.  It is now the start of a new year--and only the first month, not the eleventh--yet BHL already has a lot for which to give thanks!

Since the start of the fiscal year 2014 (October 1), donors from across the world have contributed $2,434.12 to support BHL’s continuing mission.  As a digital library consortium comprised of 13 US and 2 UK institutions, it’s encouraging to see the generosity of donors with $1,794 coming in from those countries alone ($1,681.36 and $112.76 respectively).


The Biodiversity Heritage Library provides free global access to more than 42 million pages of digitized biodiversity literature and we are so pleased to see the global response of generous support for continuing these efforts.  Donors from Australia, Brazil, Canada, El Salvador, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, and Russia have each made generous contributions totaling $640.

Historical collections of biodiversity literature are exceptionally valuable for taxonomists and others studying the diversity of life on our planet, yet this wealth of knowledge is available only to those few who can gain direct access to significant library collections. Literature about the biota existing in developing countries is often not available within their own borders.  Free global access to digital literature repatriates information about the earth’s species to all parts of the world. Because of BHL’s success in digitizing a significant mass of biodiversity literature, the study of living organisms has become more efficient. Scientists around the world are using BHL to identify and classify species, facilitate further scientific research, and support conservation efforts to prevent extinctions.

BHL is so thankful and encouraged by the generosity of all of our donors!  These donations help pay for the cost of digitizing additional literature, improving data curation, and continuing technical development for the BHL program. The examples below highlight the ways your donation can make a meaningful and lasting impact:

$25 - Creates Flickr sets of our images which are popular with educators and artists

$50 - Promotes biodiversity education through social media, such as our blog

$100 - Scans 1,000 pages to be made available for free and open access

$250 - Helps us host marketing interns who circulate biodiversity content worldwide

$500 - Improves existing methodology and helps develop new tools for biodiversity research

We hope you’ll consider making a contribution of your own to help BHL continue providing open access to biodiversity literature!   Donate:https://donate.sil.si.edu/v/DonateBHL.asp 



Digging into Data Challenge Winners Announced

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Mining Biodiversity (MiBIO): innovative computational techniques to mine BHL texts


On January 15, 2014, ten international research funders from four countries jointly announced the winners of the third Digging into Data Challenge, a competition to develop new insights, tools and skills in innovative humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis.

Fourteen international teams representing Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States will receive grants totaling approximately $5.1 million to investigate how computational techniques can be applied to “Big Data”.  Their work will address the evolving nature of humanities and social sciences research, which often relies on massive multisource datasets.  Each team represents collaborations among scholars, scientists, and information professionals from leading universities and libraries in Europe and North America.

The first round of the Digging into Data Challenge was held in 2009 and the second in 2011. Previous Digging into Data research projects have received international attention.  The 2013 winners were selected from among 69 applications and address a wide variety of topics.  Among the sponsoring bodies, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) announced, on January 15, 2014, the winners of the third Digging into Data Challenge that they will fund.  IMLS’s contribution of $424,591 supports the American researchers from three of the mentioned fourteen international teams: the Missouri Botanical Garden, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of South Carolina.

As part of an international team involving partners in UK, Canada and the USA, Missouri Botanical Garden was awarded $175,000 by the IMLS to lead the USA members of the Mining Biodiversity Project team in applying innovative computational techniques to biodiversity texts and help improve the way we view, access and share the knowledge contained within the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

The Mining Biodiversity (MiBIO) Project
Principal Investigators:

The MiBIO project is an international collaboration (UK, Canada, USA), leveraging large-scale data resources collected and curated by BHL members in US and worldwide, a digital portal developed and maintained by the BHL Technical staff at Missouri Botanical Garden and managed by the BHL Secretariat at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, text mining resources developed by the UK partner (NaCTeM), and social media, visualization and text cleaning methodologies developed by the Canadian partner (Dalhousie).  

The project’s prime objective is to promote the efficient access to and sharing of large-scale biodiversity legacy literature by the worldwide community of science libraries, museums and the interested public The project will integrate novel text mining methods, visualization, crowdsourcing and social media into the BHL to provide a semantic search system aimed to transform BHL into a next-generation social digital library resource that facilitates the study and discussion (via social media integration) of legacy science documents on biodiversity by a worldwide community.

By promoting the development of capabilities that will foster collaboration among researchers from the fields of History of Science, Environmental History, Environmental Studies, Library and Information Science and Social Media, the project hopes to make a significant impact on the above disciplines by (1) enriching a large-scale library, i.e., the BHL, via innovative application of Text Mining techniques to produce semantic metadata and a term inventory, (2) providing improved access to biodiversity-related digital artifacts via an enhanced search engine and visualization of results and (3) stimulating increased collaboration, interaction and sharing of information among BHL users via the social media environment.


The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. Our mission is to inspire libraries and museums to advance innovation, lifelong learning, and cultural and civic engagement. Our grant making, policy development, and research help libraries and museums deliver valuable services that make it possible for communities and individuals to thrive. To learn more, visit www.imls.gov and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

In addition to the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services, the sponsoring funding bodies include 
  • Arts & Humanities Research Council (United Kingdom),
  • Economic & Social Research Council (United Kingdom),
  • Canada Foundation for Innovation (Canada),
  • National Endowment for the Humanities (United States),
  • Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Canada),
  • National Science Foundation (United States),
  • Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research in collaboration with The Netherlands eScience Center (NLeSC) (Netherlands),
  • Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada).
The U.K. charity Jisc will be providing professional program management in the progression of the United Kingdom projects.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries that cooperate to digitize and make accessible the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections and to make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global “biodiversity commons.” The BHL consortium works with the international taxonomic community, rights holders, and other interested parties to ensure that this biodiversity heritage is made available to a global audience through open access principles. In partnership with the Internet Archive and through local digitization efforts, the BHL has digitized millions of pages of taxonomic literature, representing tens of thousands of titles and over 100,000 volumes.

The Missouri Botanical Garden’s mission is “to discover and share knowledge about plants and their environment in order to preserve and enrich life.” Today, 153 years after opening, the Missouri Botanical Garden is a National Historic Landmark and a center for science, conservation, education and horticultural display.  

The Center for Biodiversity Informatics (CBI) at the Missouri Botanical Garden seeks to provide innovative technology solutions to the global community of life science scholars in order to mobilize, integrate, and repatriate data about the world’s biodiversity.

Find more information at:

MiBIO Project Website: www.nactem.ac.uk/DID-MIBIO/





William Ulate R.
BHL Global Coordinator and BHL-US/UK Technical Director
Missouri Botanical Garden

Happy Lunar New Year from BHL and Equus Caballus!

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Album of celebrated American and English running horses.
New York: Kinney Bros. [1888?]
biodiversitylibrary.org/page/24788565

From agriculture to transportation to war, Equus caballus has held a prominent and highly respected position in cultures across the world for thousands of years.  With the Lunar New Year celebrations underway for the next several days, we're ushering in the year of the horse with some highlights on horse biodiversity from the literature in BHL!
    The new book of the horse.  London: Cassell and Co., 1911.
    biodiversitylibrary.org/page/254311803
    • So you've always wanted to learn to ride a horse but weren't sure where to start?  For some turn- of-the-century tips on trotting, walking, and galloping, look no further than the 1881 treatise How to Ride and School a Horse by Edward L. Anderson.  As a bonus, Anderson has also included some tips on horse gymnastics! 
    The analysis of the hunting field. London: Methuen, 1904.
    biodiversitylibrary.org/page/20389207
    • Which modern horse can't be ridden?  Considered the last truly wild horse, Equus przewalskii Poliakov, 1881, more commonly known as Przewalskii's horse, is the only extant horse to never be tamed.  Nearly extinct by the late twentieth century, it has been reintroduced into the wild in places like China and Mongolia and its status has been updated to endangered.  Populations have seen some increases but threats such as disease, habitat destruction, and climate change remain.  BHL and our partners at EOL work hard to provide open access to information about species, including habitat and behavior, so that informed conservation decisions can be made, especially for those that been threatened or endangered.  Learn more about Przewalskii's horse in BHL:  http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/name/Equus_przewalskii.

      The Evolution of the Horse Family,
      as illustrated in the Yale Collections.
      American Journal of Science, 1907.
      biodiversitylibrary.org/page/40226990
      • How do modern horses differ from their earlier counter-parts?  Many of you may already know that pre-historic horses were generally smaller than modern horses but you may be surprised to learn that one of the key differences was the number of toes.  That's right, toes.  While the modern horse has one-toed hooves, many pre-historic horses had three or more toes as shown in the illustration to the right.  Find out about how these changes may have benefitted horses as they evolved and discover other changes as described in Richard S. Lull's 1907 article The Evolution of the Horse Family, as illustrated in the Yale Collections in the American journal of science.

      Horses are documented in over 400 pages of open access literature in BHL, with a significant portion focusing on the modern Equus caballus: http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/name/Equus%20caballus.
      BHL relies on donations from individuals to support scanning of the biodiversity literature held in some of the world's most renowned natural history and botanical libraries.  The examples below highlight the ways your donation can make a meaningful and lasting impact:

      $25 - Creates Flickr sets of our images which are popular with educators and artists

      $50 - Promotes biodiversity education through social media, such as our blog

      $100 - Scans 1,000 pages to be made available for free and open access

      $250 - Helps us support marketing interns who circulate biodiversity content worldwide

      $500 - Improves existing methodology and helps develop new tools for biodiversity research

      Help make the year of the horse a lucky and prosperous year for BHL and our users by making a donation to support our continued growth!  https://donate.sil.si.edu/v/DonateBHL.asp 


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