The Rhododendrons of Sikkim-Himalaya

June 30, 2017, 5:30 am

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By Virginia Mills 
Project Officer, the Joseph Hooker Correspondence Project
The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 

Joseph Hooker, born 200 years ago this year, may have been the greatest botanist of the nineteenth century, professionalizing practice of the discipline and establishing the system of botanical classification used almost universally until the advent of genetics-based systems. He was certainly one of the most pivotal Directors in the history of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, defending its role as a scientific institution rather than a pleasure park and expanding its infrastructure and collections. However, to horticulturalists, he is perhaps best known for his introduction of new species of Rhododendron to Europe in the mid 19th century.

Rhododendron argenteum one of Hooker's new species published in The Rhododendrons of Sikkim-Himalaya. http://s.si.edu/2tkRKAP. Drawing by Joseph Dalton Hooker. Lithographed by Walter Hood Fitch. Digitized by the Missouri Botanical Garden.

It was whilst on a plant collecting expedition in India and the Himalayas (1847-1851) that Hooker became the first European to be granted permission to explore what was then the autonomous kingdom of Sikkim, now a northern state of India, which had previously been closed to foreign explorers. In this unspoilt mountain kingdom, he gathered over 25 species of Rhododendron that would prove to be unknown to science and to European horticulturalists.

Spectacular illustrations of these Rhododendrons were published in the lavish book The Rhododendrons of Sikkim-Himalaya. At Kew, we love that these are available to view online at the Biodiversity Heritage Library for ease of access along with many other landmark publications by Hooker. You can also browse the superb illustrations on Flickr.

Illustrations from Hooker's Rhododendrons of Sikkim-Himalaya made available through Flickr by our partners at BHL.

Hooker braved the monsoon rains to ensure that he could collect seeds of these new botanical beauties. His letters from the expedition, recently digitized by the archives of Kew Gardens, describe the discomforts of the endeavor: frozen fingers, the shin tearing Rhododendron scrub, prolific leeches, the danger from overflowing rivers, snow blindness, rock falls and the added suffering of altitude sickness to name a few.

"Worst of all is the depressing effect of being often baffled: you go at up a gully, take a probable branch, are turned at the top,: down you go, every step lost & try another, & so on, 4, 5, & 6 times perhaps; till, utterly fagged, you slope at night-fall down to camp, wet bruised & dissatisfied." (Source)

Hooker was sometimes demoralized but not deterred and was determined to collect as much as he could:

"These explorations are very hard work, but I get such lots of plants that they are always abundantly profitable". (Source)

More tales of Hooker's collecting trials in his own words are available online through Kew's Joseph Hooker correspondence project and in his published Journal available on BHL. Some of my personal favorites include imprisonment by the Rajah and a close shave with an avalanche in which his collecting companion, a dog named Kinchin, lost his whiskers.

Victorian photograph of the Rhodoedndron Dell at The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Reproduced by the Permission of the Trustees of The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

The Kew Gardens Annual Report of 1850 records the receipt of '21 baskets of Indian orchids and new species of Rhododendron' from Hooker. The Rhododendrons were planted in Kew's hollow walk, to become known as the Rhododendron dell, and shared with nurseries and gardeners across Europe, starting a craze for the plants and a legacy of their profusion across the gardens of stately homes in particular.

Field sketch of Rhododendron falconeri by Joseph Hooker, c.1850. Reproduced by the Permission of the Trustees of The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

The additional annotated field sketches, dried plants and descriptions that Hooker sent home allowed the great botanical artist Walter Hood Fitch and Joseph Hooker's father, botanist William Jackson Hooker, to publish The Rhododendrons of Sikkim Himalaya before Joseph had even returned home. To mark the bicentenary of Hooker's birth this year, Kew has reproduced a facsimile edition of the publication from the first edition held in its library collection.

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BHL Welcomes Three New Affiliates

July 3, 2017, 5:00 am

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BHL is pleased to welcome three long-time Partners as the consortium’s newest Affiliates: BHL Egypt, BHL China, and BHL SciELO.

The BHL consortium now consists of 18 Members and 18 Affiliates. Members and Affiliates contribute content, provide technical services, and participate in BHL committees, task forces, and working groups. Additionally, Members, who contribute 10,000 USD in annual dues, have governance privileges and vote on strategic directives.

BHL Egypt 

BHL Egypt, led by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA), joined the Biodiversity Heritage Library in 2009. A major library and cultural center located in Alexandria, Egypt, Bibliotecha Alexandrina has long brought considerable technical expertise to the BHL consortium. The BA provides access to a subset of the BHL collection through its own Digital Assets Repository, which features an Arabic-aware (right to left) book reader. As an Affiliate, BHL Egypt will continue to provide technical support and services to facilitate BHL’s ongoing development.

BHL China 

BHL China, founded by the Institute of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s first Affiliate in China. Established in 1928, the Institute of Botany is one of the oldest comprehensive research institutions in China. Host to the largest herbarium in Asia, two botanical gardens, and several laboratories, the Institute is a national leader in the development of the country’s plant science research. Since first joining BHL as a partner in 2010, the Institute of Botany has contributed over 325,000 pages to BHL through the BHL China program.

BHL SciELO 

The BHL SciELO Network is the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s first Affiliate in South America. BHL SciELO is implemented by the Scientific Electronic Library (SciELO) Program, which encompass a network of national collections of open access journals in 15 countries. SciELO Brazil coordinates the BHL SciELO Network involving the main biodiversity libraries of Brazil with political and financial support from the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) and the Secretary of Biodiversity of the Ministry of Environment. SciELO joined BHL as a partner in 2010, and since then it has contributed over 107,000 pages to BHL’s collection.

Using the materials at hand: Richard Archbold and the 2nd Archbold Expedition to New Guinea

July 6, 2017, 5:00 am

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By Kendra Meyer 
Field Book Project Archivist, American Museum of Natural History

The American Museum of Natural History selected two unique sets of material to digitize for the CLIR BHL Field Notes Project: field books from the Whitney South Sea Expedition and the Archbold Expeditions. These were two long-running undertakings to systematically explore and collect the flora and fauna of Oceania. Both contributed invaluable specimens to the scientific research and exhibition collections at AMNH. We recently completed digitization of the Whitney South Sea Expedition field notes and are thrilled to have commenced work on the Archbold material. Arguably, the most rewarding aspect of participating in this project is raising awareness of some rather remarkable individuals and expeditions. One example is the 2nd Archbold Expedition to New Guinea. We recently digitized leader Richard Archbold’s journal from that journey, which helps shine a light on this particularly fascinating story.

Archbold Expeditions is a corporation originally founded and led by Richard Archbold. It funded a research collection and staff at the AMNH Department of Mammalogy and sponsored a series of scientific collecting journeys to New Guinea and northern Australia. Heir to a substantial fortune, Archbold was a collector, explorer, ecologist, photographer, mountaineer, and pilot. As a youth he developed a love of nature and technology which carried over into all his future endeavors. He was a Research Associate at AMNH since his participation as photographer and mammalogist in the Mission zoologique franco-anglo-américaine à Madagascar, an experience which would directly inspire him to continue exploration work. He led the first three of the Archbold New Guinea Expeditions himself, and in 1940 founded the Archbold Biological Station in Florida. This research station and Archbold Expeditions were associated with AMNH until the 1980s. The Archbold Biological Station is still vitally active today.

Archbold excelled at organization and planning, recognizing needs and filling them. He regularly made use of and adapted the most current technology and also sought after the best scientists and personnel for his expeditions.

Some of the 2nd Archbold Expedition participants, including scientific party Austin Rand, G. H. H. Tate and Leonard Brass. All three participated in multiple Archbold Expeditions. “WH2; Papua, Oroville Camp; Juhlstedt, Rand, Tate, Archbold, Burke, Healy, Brass.” Archbold Expeditions Collection, Department of Mammalogy, AMNH.

This ability to recognize needs and adapt is never more evident than in the 2nd Archbold Expedition, which took place between 1936 and 1937. There were seven ‘numbered’ Archbold Expeditions to New Guinea, reaching all areas of the region. The focus for this journey was the largely uncharted area of the Western Province of Papua New Guinea from Daru up the Fly River. After the success of the first expedition to New Guinea between 1933 and 1934, Richard Archbold hoped to continue the systematic exploration of Papua New Guinea, but he recognized that one of the main challenges to exploration in this region was in the effective provision and transportation of supplies overland in this mountainous terrain. Describing it as “the biggest bugbear of former travel in New Guinea,” (1) the lack of local food availability resulted in a need for a continuously moving food relay transport system manned with native assistants.

Demonstrating the above-mentioned practical planning and technological skills, Archbold and crew proposed and designed an innovative system of communication, transportation and delivery using aircraft, radio, and parachutes to utilize in the next trek. In addition to Archbold, the scientific party included ornithologist and assistant leader Austin Rand, botanist Leonard Brass, and mammalogist G. H. H. Tate.

Archbold is walking toward the front of the craft. Note the triangular Archbold Expeditions insignia on the plane. “90-43; Papua, W.D., Daru: Kono on ramp after return from Lake Marguerita.” Archbold Expeditions Collection, Department of Mammalogy, AMNH.

Archbold purchased a Fairchild Amphibian seaplane which he named the Kono, to be used to deliver supplies to the remote areas by parachute. The combination of air transport, along with a system of radio communications proved to be highly successful in practice. The use of the radios allowed the various divisions of the expedition (advance land party, collecting group and plane) to keep in contact and coordinate supply drops and pickups from remote areas, communication on which they were dependent.

Besides collecting mammals, Tate acted as a radio operator. “210-18; Papua, Western Division, Fly River, 528 mi. camp: Willis, Rogers, Tate & Healy” Archbold Expeditions Collection, Department of Mammalogy, AMNH.

Besides transportation, the aircraft was also used for a series of reconnaissance flights to determine mountain camp sites and possible landing areas. In Archbold’s journal we see multiple lists of observations from these flights. They note the time, the participant making the observation, and even where they were seated, an evident effort to fully survey the viewed areas.

Reconnaissance flight observations. Richard Archbold’s journal : Second Archbold Expedition to New Guinea, p. [19]; http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/53611788

Initial plans called for the group to travel up to high elevations in the mountains but in July of 1936, only a few months into their endeavor, the Kono was tragically capsized in a sudden storm. Although no one was harmed, the devastation of this loss is clearly conveyed in a series of radio messages: “Our plane sunk.” In Tate’s expedition journal, which will soon be digitized for this project, he relates receiving the message, stating “What a calamity for Archbold!”(2)

Messages to Tate and Rand announcing the wreck of the Kono. Richard Archbold’s journal : Second Archbold Expedition to New Guinea, p. [101]; http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/53611844

Besides the obvious financial setback of this loss, the team was forced to quickly adapt their plans, arranging for alternate means to transport the collections. The scientific staff and the carriers built a flotilla of rafts to move the specimens and supplies down the Fly River. According to Rand, "Tate had his rats on his rafts, Brass his plants on his, and I had my birds on mine.” (3) Not to be deterred, they simply moved forward and continued collecting in the lowlands, a resilience I find enviable. This is not to say that the irony of the situation was lost on the participants. In an article for Natural History magazine, Rand and Archbold noted that during the expedition both the most current and the most primitive methods of transportation were used: planes, ships, homemade rafts, and foot. (4)

After having to abandon plans to continue to higher altitudes, the team crafted a series of rafts to float material down the Fly River. “258-20; Papua, W.D., Fly R., No. 2 base: Rafts being loaded—close up. Photo by Brass” Archbold Expeditions Collection, Department of Mammalogy, AMNH.

It is important to note the very practical advantage and benefit of their radio system at this juncture. It not only allowed easy communication, remote organization and project direction across the region, but also contact with New York. A copy of a radiogram received at AMNH on July 16, 1936 from Archbold at Daru reassures the safety of all parties. “Absolutely no cause for alarm stop Rogers dropped more food advance party in Guinea Airways plane stop in constant radio communication advance party stop they advise absolutely no danger.” (5)

Archbold immediately began planning for the next expedition, even looking to purchase a replacement plane. A copy of a radio message from his mother shows her practical opposition to such an expense so soon. Archbold remained single-minded, however. “Though we had failed to reach the mountains our large collections from the Upper Fly were extremely valuable and our new methods of transport had proved so feasible that we plan to use the same system in collecting at the highest altitudes in the little known Snow Mountains of Dutch New Guinea early next year.” (6) That expedition also used the combination of seaplane delivery and radio with great success, incidentally also managing to set world aeronautic records! Amusingly, Archbold named this next plane the ‘Guba,’ which is the local dialectic term for the type of storm that downed the Kono.

A page from Archbold's journal. Note the message from his mother. Richard Archbold’s journal : Second Archbold Expedition to New Guinea, p. [113];

For context, it is interesting to place these expeditions in the overarching history of biodiversity exploration and collection in the region. In 2015, AMNH scientists participated in a collaborative Explore21 expedition to Papua New Guinea. Department of Ornithology Collections Manager Paul Sweet noted their place in the legacy of exploration in New Guinea, notably with the use of now modern technology: “Papua New Guinea is well known as a biodiversity hotspot, but it’s still not fully explored. The Museum has a long history of making expeditions to the island of New Guinea [the eastern half is part of the nation of Papua New Guinea; the western half is governed by Indonesia], so we were following in the tradition of naturalist explorers like Ernst Mayr, Richard Archbold, and E. Thomas Gilliard. And that’s really the thrust of these Explore21 expeditions. It’s a great way to continue the tradition of scientific collecting expeditions alongside cutting edge 21-century methods like genomics.” (7)

Hmm, cutting-edge technology and expeditions…sound familiar?

References:

(1) Archbold, Richard and Rand, A.L., “With plane and radio in stone age New Guinea,” Natural History 40, no. 3 (1937): 568.
(2) Tate, G. H. H., Field journal : Archbold 1936 New Guinea Exp. February 27, 1936 to July 8, 1937. AMNH Department of Mammalogy Archive.
(3) Morse, Roger A., Richard Archbold and the Archbold Biological Station. (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2000), 18.
(4) Archbold, Richard and Rand, A.L., “With plane and radio in stone age New Guinea,” Natural History 40, no. 3 (1937)
(5) Radiogram transcript, 1936, Archbold Expeditions Collection, AMNH Department of Mammalogy Archive.
(6) Archbold and Rand, 576.
(7) AMNH, “SciCafe Goes to Papua New Guinea [blog post], (2/27/15), accessed at http://www.amnh.org/explore/news-blogs/q-as/scicafe-goes-to-papua-new-guinea


The BHL Field Notes Project is funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR).

Unearthing Precambrian Protistan Taxonomy with BHL

July 13, 2017, 5:30 am

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Amoebozoans are believed to have existed for hundreds of millions of years. These ancient protists are characterized by the presence of pseudopodia, cytoplasm-filled projections that are used for locomotion and feeding.

Today, over 2,000 species of Amoebozoa are recognized. The phylum itself was first scientifically described by Max Lühe, a professor at the University of Königsberg (Germany), in 1913.

Dr. Leigh Anne Riedman, a NASA Astrobiology Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University (Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences), specializes in Precambrian paleontology. Her research involves fossils similar to the testate amoebae described and illustrated by Lühe in 1913. However, Riedman quickly discovered that tracking down the reference for Lühe’s paper to support her studies was more challenging than anticipated.

“Many authors working on Amoebozoa would mention Lühe’s name, but I never found a single full reference for this paper,” recalls Riedman.

Testate amoebae described and illustrated by Max Lühe. Handbuch der Morphologie der wirbellosen Tiere. Bd. 1 (1913). Digitized by the American Museum of Natural History. http://s.si.edu/2tiM3BF.

Fortunately, with help of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, Riedman was able to unearth this crucial publication.

“Armed with only an author name and year, Lühe, 1913, and the keyword ‘amoeboa,’ I found it!” exclaims Riedman. “BHL was the only place I was able to track down this reference.”

Riedman cites this reference in her upcoming paper, “Vase-Shaped Microfossil Biostratigraphy with New Data from Tasmania, Svalbard, Greenland, Sweden and the Yukon”, which will be published in Precambrian Research later this year.

Dr. Riedman on a sampling trip to King Island, Tasmania in 2010. She and her colleagues collected materials for study of acritarchs from the Sturtian glaciation and the interglacial interval of the Neoproterozoic Snowball Earth as well as older fossils called vase-shaped microfossils that are thought to be fossil testate amoebae.

Riedman has been studying Precambrian paleontology for nearly two decades. Her work deals with a group of fossils called the acritarchs, organic microfossils that first appeared approximately 1,400 to 3,200 million years ago. Since first discovering BHL while searching for early taxonomic works on this group, the Library has become a vital part of Riedman’s research process.

“BHL is fantastic!” lauds Riedman. “It has made a huge difference in my work- sometimes providing access to texts I wouldn’t otherwise be able to get, sometimes by giving me the gift of my own time, as I don’t have to spend hours or days tracking down a resource, waiting on interlibrary loan, and then either scanning it for text recognition and translation or typing it into a translator piece-meal.”

Vase-shaped microfossils from Tasmania. Likely about 760 million years old.

Using BHL several times per month, Riedman downloads PDFs of articles or books for use in fossil identification and synonymy lists. The ability to view the whole journal volume within BHL not only gives Riedman context for the article she is seeking, but also helps her find additional relevant articles in the process, thereby increasing the quality and efficiency of her research.

“There have been several times that I’ve used BHL to track down references listed in taxonomic synonymy sections that weren’t available anywhere else,” shares Riedman. “I am paranoid about citing a reference I’ve never read, so without getting access to those texts through BHL, I might have had to cut sections from research papers or sell my soul and cite a paper sight unseen *gasp*!”

Dr. Riedman sampling drillcore in Alice Springs, Australia. These shale samples were placed into hydrofluoric acid to dissolve the rock- this process leaves the organic-walled fossils intact. Those are then studied by transmitted light microscope and scanning electron microscope.

In Riedman’s opinion, BHL is important not only for supporting modern scientific research, but also for ensuring that the work of past scientists is not forgotten.

“Many of the articles I’ve been able to access through BHL were written by pioneers in this field, like Tadas Jankauskas and Boris Timofeev, and their work deserves recognition (even if it is in a language other than English!),” emphasizes Riedman. “Our field is too young to be forgetting its past already. I am so glad to be able to gain access to more and more of these publications online.”

Dr. Riedman sampling drillcore in Darwin, Australia.

Through its worldwide consortium of natural history and botanical libraries, the Biodiversity Heritage Library is working to ensure that the published record of biodiversity knowledge is freely available to researchers across the globe. By making this content globally accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, BHL is helping to advance scientific research and inspire discovery of the natural world.

You can help support global research through a tax-deductible donation to BHL. With your help, we can continue to democratize access to information about biodiversity and empower scientific research on a global scale.

By Grace Costantino 
Outreach and Communication Manager 
Biodiversity Heritage Library

Take Our Survey and Share Your Feedback About BHL!

July 17, 2017, 5:30 am

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) needs your feedback!

Take our survey and tell us what improvements and new features you'd like to see in BHL.

We will be updating the BHL website to improve and enhance the researcher experience. As members of the BHL community, your feedback is valuable. Your input will help us identify which improvements and features to focus on in the design process.

Click here to take the survey: s.si.edu/BHLUserSurvey

We appreciate any thoughts or suggestions you may be able to provide. If you have any questions or comments, please submit them via our feedback form.

This survey is being conducted as part of the BHL NDSR Foundations to Actions project, which is helping to plan the future of BHL. Learn more.

NDSR Residents Mid-Year Update

July 18, 2017, 5:30 am

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We officially passed the halfway point in our residencies in June and have begun to work on compiling our research into a final report. We are excited to bring you some project updates and report on our conference presentations. 

Pam’s individual user survey is now live and collecting responses to help BHL improve the user experience. Her last update describes the characteristics that make up the different BHL user groups:(1) Consortium Users; (2) System Users; and (3) Individual Users.

1. Consortium Users:  A contributor to BHL including Members, Affiliates, Partners, staff, and volunteers

2. System Users:  Organizations or individuals who interact with BHL for the purpose of enriching another system via APIs (Application Programming Interface) or manually

3. Individual Users:  Anyone visiting the BHL website to search for information to answer their research needs such as, scientists, collection managers, librarians, etc.

For her NDSR project at Smithsonian Libraries, Pam will be gathering feedback from the users of BHL to help inform the next version of the digital library. She’s had the opportunity to meet with several partners of BHL and sit in on BHL Member, Collection, and Tech Team meetings. Through these interactions, she has been able to learn more about the BHL users and will be developing surveys and interviews to gather feedback directly from the users. Moving forward, BHL looks to enhance current features and implement new features that will enrich the user experience, providing additional insight into the world’s knowledge of biodiversity. Investigating user needs with BHL may also prove useful in identifying user behaviors and preferences that would be applicable for other digital libraries as well.

CoderGirl Program Director, Crystal Martin, welcomes Summer 2017 students on the first night of the program! About 100 students total are participating on various tracks.

Last week, Ariadne joined the CoderGirl UX (User Experience) Summer 2017 Cohort. CoderGirl is a technology training program and community for women in St. Louis that is part of the LaunchCode Education initiative. Participation is free; mentors working in the field offer their time to teach on a volunteer basis. The UX track is a 6 month program designed to grow skills in UX research and design in a supportive, creative, and diverse environment. The track centers around the development of a project that will serve as a UX portfolio.

Beyond this, Ariadne is focusing on interviewing BHL Flickr taggers and Science Gossip members to understand the successes and challenges of these programs and the motivations and backgrounds of participants. Most importantly, Ariadne hopes to convey their  perspectives as she makes recommendations for improving access to natural history illustrations and BHL’s future crowdsourcing/citizen science initiatives.

Marissa has been working with several summer interns at NHMLAC to create and edit metadata for the museum’s publication Contributions in Science. This process has involved much fine-tuning, but establishing a clear workflow is important as the museum hopes to contribute more of its in-house publications to BHL in the future!

This project is also timely as the museum’s invertebrate paleontology department is in the process of digitizing some of their thousands of specimens and specimen records, and Marissa has been in contact with them to see how we can possibly connect the digitized specimen information with their occurrences in biodiversity literature.

Contributions in Science articles in their natural habitat

In May, Katie participated in WikiCite 2017, a conference, summit, and hackathon event organized for members of the Wikimedia community to discuss ideas and projects surrounding the concept of adding structured bibliographic metadata to Wikidata to improve the quality of references in the Wikimedia universe. Generating Linked Open Data citations has the potential to connect objects and concepts with information resources to create context for more accurate and interesting digital representations of knowledge and cultural heritage. And more complete and complex graphs are better at supporting deeper investigations, queries, and visualizations of these data across repositories, collections, and knowledge bases.

One way that GLAMs can begin to integrate their catalog records with Wikidata (and therefore across Wikimedia projects and other repositories across the web that are connected to Wikidata), is by using its power for reconciling messy data. One of the biggest problems with BHL bibliographic metadata is that it comes from lots of different libraries and museums and is often as old and outdated as the content it describes.

For example: BHL attaches Creator IDs to Author names, which is useful for identification and connecting titles and items to their Authors, but they are assigned automatically according to the character strings imported from specific fields in a library catalog’s MARC record. Despite (and perhaps because of) the use of authority files to control Author name strings in catalog records, different libraries have contributed items by the same author whose names are are spelled, punctuated, and identified differently. The process of finding all of the different spellings of author names and colocating them under a single unique identifier is called “reconciling”, and BHL does not do it, choosing instead to focus on improving access to items based on content rather than metadata. Fortunately, there are several different ways to go about reconciling data, and one of them is crowdsourcing.

BHL can use Wikidata to tell its users that “Packard, Alpheus S” (Creator ID: 82636), “Packard, A” (Creator ID: 59850), “Packard, A S” (Creator ID: 48286), “Packard, A. S. (Alpheus Spring), 1839-1905” (Creator ID: 1592), and “Packard, Alpheus Spring” (Creator ID: 56087) are all the same person without editing spellings or legacy metadata from the catalog record. While some of the reconciling can be done computationally using (still more) authority files like VIAF, it often misidentifies strings and isn’t very helpful when an author is not in that particular database. These errors are best caught by humans, who Wikidata invites to directly edit mistakes and add identifiers.

BHL can use Wikidata by adding a property for a BHL Creator ID in Wikidata (P4081) and adding a table in BHL for Wikidata IDs that can be associated with those same Creator IDs. By adding BHL IDs to Wikidata, it becomes a more robust knowledge base that will improve the discoverability of BHL’s content by enriching its metadata externally and solving some metadata problems internally.

 

Subscribe to the BHL NDSR blog for an upcoming post that will describe this process in more detail.

Alicia attended the Inaugural Digital Data in Biodiversity Research Conference sponsored by iDigBio, the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, the University of Michigan Herbarium, and the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology in June. The conference brought together biodiversity researchers, data providers, data aggregators, collection managers, and librarians to talk about creating digital biodiversity data, sharing this data, and using it in research.

The presentations, posters, and workshops highlighted research trends in biodiversity and projects that have open access missions similar to BHL’s. She was able to give a talk about using statistical analysis to calculate the size of biodiversity literature (using capture-mark-recapture) and present a poster about visually representing the collection at BHL.

And in June, we represented BHL and NDSR at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago. The conference, hosted by the American Library Association, was held to discuss, learn, and exchange ideas about libraries on the theme “Transforming Our Libraries, Ourselves.” With 25,000 attendees, masses of sessions and talks, and a mountain of freebies, ALA can be an overwhelming experience — we managed to find our way and learned about different library projects and trends from around the country.

One of our main goals was to present our “Halfway Remarks” poster on behalf of all of the BHL NDSR Residents. Alicia Esquivel of the Chicago Botanic Garden and Ariadne Rehbein of the Missouri Botanical Garden attended and presented.

All of us Residents are thankful for the opportunities we have had to attend and present at conferences during the first half of our residencies. Our next professional meeting will be the BHL tech meeting in September where all of the Residents and Mentors will join the BHL Technical Team in St. Louis to discuss our findings of best practices and recommendations for BHL.

2016 BHL Annual Report

July 19, 2017, 5:30 am

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The 2016 BHL Annual Report is now available!

Find out how our collections grew and audiences engaged with our library in 2016, learn more about some exciting new projects, and explore impact stories from users across the globe. Read the report now!

You can also get the latest updates from BHL in our newsletters. Explore past newsletters here and subscribe to our mailing list here.

CBHL 2017: Expanding Access visits the Twin Cities

July 20, 2017, 6:00 am

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The Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries met for its annual conference in Chaska, Minnesota this year.  The conference, which took place June 5th through June 9th, was attended by three Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature team members: Susan Fraser, Susan Lynch, and Mariah Lewis.  

Tuesday the team hosted a pre-conference workshop titled “Contributing to a National Digital Infrastructure, with Help Every Step of the Way.”  The workshop was attended by both members of CBHL and those outside CBHL who were interested in the Expanding Access project.  The training covered a variety of topics including collection development, the Digital Public Library of America, metadata, imaging standards, BHL related tools and defining articles within BHL. The three-hour session was well attended and some attendees are expected to contribute to BHL in the upcoming months while others have already added content through Expanding Access.  Check out the Lloyd Library and Museum’s contributions here!

Tuesday evening, after a day of committee meetings, the opening reception kicked off the annual CBHL meeting.  A wonderful evening of hors d'oeuvres allowed members to reconnect and meet the ten first time attendees.  

The next day was spent at the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, a quick drive past Prince’s Paisley Park.  Kathy Allen, this year’s host and the Librarian at the Andersen Horticultural Library, welcomed CBHL members and introduced the Arboretum Director, Peter C. Moe, who gave a thorough, informative and interesting introduction to the Arboretum.  This was followed by a presentation about the Arboretum’s education programs by the Director of the Education Department, Tim Kenny.  

The next presentation of the day followed David Bedford’s experiences with apple breeding at the University of Minnesota.  A Senior Research Fellow at the Horticultural Research Center, Bedford took the audience through a history of apple migration and how exactly we get those delicious apple varieties we see in the grocery store.  Notably, the University of Minnesota has developed such apple varieties as Honeycrisp, Regent, and SweeTango.       

Wednesday afternoon was spent touring the garden and the Andersen Horticultural Library. Following this was a tram ride around 3-Mile Drive and a stop in at the newly constructed Tashjian Bee and Pollinator Discovery Center, which has been open less than a year.  The Center was created to be both an educational and outreach project in association with the University of Minnesota’s world-renowned bee research.

Thursday the attendees ventured to the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities.  The morning kicked off in the Wangensteen Library of Biology & Medicine, where tours of the stacks and a rare book showing were given.  Later, members were able to tour the Weisman Art Museum and spend time in the Dear Darwin exhibit.  The crew then walked across the Mississippi on their way to the Elmer L. Andersen Library.  

The early afternoon was spent between two activities.  The first was a presentation on the University of Minnesota’s Children’s Literature Research Collection which included a viewing of original artwork by Anne Ophelia Dowden, Betsy Bowen, and Phyllis Root.  The second activity was a tour through the Minnesota Library Access Center- the cavernous storage facility that can hold up to 1.4 million volumes.  With shelves standing 17 feet tall, items are shelved by size and retrieved by forklift.  Later that afternoon there was a panel discussion of Collection Stewardship.

After the group’s time at the University of Minnesota, they traveled to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, taking advantage of the range of art and artifacts in the wonderfully-curated exhibits.  Also nearby was “Eat Street.”  Covering seventeen blocks, Eat Street incorporates a number of different culinary styles, flavors and atmospheres.

On Friday, the annual meeting returned to the Andersen Arboretum.  After a morning of business meetings, a joint CBHL/Friends of the Andersen Horticultural Library Luncheon was held.  CBHL members were able to enjoy the company of the Friends of the Library, who had graciously helped secure the luncheon speaker, and furniture designer legacy Mira Nakashima.  Reflecting on the life and career of her father, master furniture designer George Nakashima, and the current pieces the company is now working to create, Mira Nakashima’s presentation allowed the audience to travel with her into her memories.  After lunch Mira Nakashima led small group tours of the Andersen Library’s Nakashima furniture collection.  

That afternoon, there was an Arboretum Behind-the-Scene bus tour where participants were able to see more than just the main area.  This included seeing the apple orchards referenced in an earlier presentation and the home of the osprey family that stars in the University of Minnesota Osprey Cam.  

The conference concluded after the Annual Literature Award Ceremony and Banquet.  Each year, after the presentation of the awards and during the banquet, the members enjoy a final speaker and the book raffle.  

This year’s banquet speaker was Dr. David Zlesak.  An Associate Professor of Horticulture at the University of Wisconsin, the presentation focused on the plant introduction pipeline.  This follows the life of new varieties from planning and breeding to marketing and selling.

Eight member presentations were given throughout the week.  A chance to share institutional projects with other members, the topics included plant information, children’s literature diversity, film crews in archives, Wikipedia edit-a-thons, bookplates, book reviews, lost gardens, and a new collection management system at the Morton Arboretum.  

To read more about the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries Annual Conference, check out the September issue of the CBHL Newsletter.  

By Mariah Lewis
Metadata Specialist
Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature
The New York Botanical Garden

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BHL activities at the 2017 American Libraries Association Annual Conference

July 21, 2017, 5:30 am

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BHL Program Director, Martin R. Kalfatovic, attended the 2017 American Libraries Association Annual Conference in Chicago, IL during the week of 22-26 June 2017. In this post, he provides an update on BHL activities at the conference.

BHL activities at the 2017 American Libraries Association Annual Conference
By: Martin R. Kalfatovic

I met with staff at the Field Museum Library, Christine Giannoni and Diana Duncan. We had a chance to catch up on the latest activities of the Field on behalf of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (of which the Field is a founding member). I also had a chance to catch up with Rusty Russell, ‎Director, Gantz Family Collections Center. Rusty, previously Head of Collections, U.S. National Herbarium (Smithsonian Institution), has been a long-time supporter of the BHL and one of the main drivers behind the Smithsonian's Field Book Project. Rusty also gave a personal tour of the Field's spectacular new exhibition, "Specimens: Unlocking the Secrets of Life", which provides wonderful context to the importance of natural history collections.

Russel (left) & Kalfatovic (right)

Diana Duncan

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Esquivel (left) & Rehbein (right)

A highlight of the Conference was visiting the ALA Poster Sessions and talking with the BHL National Digital Stewardship Residents who presented a poster on 25 June entitled "Improving Access to the Biodiversity Heritage Library: Halfway Remarks by National Digital Stewardship Residents". Ariadne Rehbein (based at the Missouri Botanical Garden) and Alicia Esquivel (Chicago Botanic Garden) presented the poster on behalf of their fellow NDSR residents (Marissa Kings, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County; Pamela McClanahan, Smithsonian Libraries; and Katie Mika, Ernst Mayr Library at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology). NDSR mentor, Leora Siegel (Senior Director, Lenhardt Library at the Chicago Botanic Garden) also dropped by the poster session. Read more about the Residents in Chicago in BHL NDSR at ALA.

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OCLC 50th Anniversary Celebration
Attending the OCLC 50th Anniversary Celebration in the spectacular setting of the Adler Planetarium provided an excellent opportunity to speak with colleagues from around the country as well as senior OCLC staff.

Internet Archive at ALA
I also attended a session organized by the Internet Archive to hear the team discuss OpenLibraries -- a project that will enable every US library to become a more digital library. The goal is to work with library partners and organizations to bring 4 million books online, through purchase or digitization, starting with the century of books missing from our digital shelves. The plan includes at-scale circulation of these e-books, enabling libraries owning the physical works to lend digital copies to their patrons. This will enable thousands of libraries to unlock their analog collections for a new generation of learners, enabling free, long-term, public access to knowledge. I also had a chance after the session to catch up with long-time BHL supporter Brewster Kahle and Wendy Hanamura (Director of Partnerships at the Internet Archive and lead for the Internet Archives' partnership as a BHL Affiliate).

Hanamura (left) & Kahle (right)

Cats & Dogs: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Perspectives

July 24, 2017, 5:30 am

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This blog post incorporates research conducted for the digital exhibition, "Wild Mouser to Household Pet: A History of Cats in Science and Society, 1858 to 1922." Click here to check out the exhibition and book collection!

Dielman, Frederick. “Uncle Tobey and the widow.” Library of Congress Prints & Photographs. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016652317/.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States and Europe, cats were just beginning to be seen as household pets. Previously, they were viewed as biological specimens for medical study, muses for literature, and mousers that roamed around killing rodents. The way that people saw cats often involved a comparison with dogs. But how different are these two species? How did people perceive of those differences and similarities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?

Usefulness 

Gos., De Voogt. Our Domestic Animals: Their Habits, Intelligence, and Usefulness (1907). Digitized by the Library of Congress.

Authors compared cats and dogs in order to claim their favorite as superior. For example, in Domesticated Animals, Their Relation to Man and His Advancement in Civilization(1895), Nathaniel Southgate Shaler wrote:

Cats deserve some mention for the reason, that, while they are the least essential, and on the whole the least interesting, of domesticated animals, they have had a certain place in civilization. They afford, moreover, a capital foil by which to set off the virtues of the dog [1]. 

Clearly, Shaler is fond of dogs. He highlights one of the starkest differences between cats and dogs: their usefulness. While dogs were domesticated by humans to perform a variety of tasks such as hunting, cats never had much of a purpose beyond “mousing” (catching rodents, especially on farms with grain storages). This limited purpose led to less variation in cat breeding. However, cat enthusiasts still did breed and exhibit purebred cats.

Huidekoper, Rush Shippen. The Cat: A Guide to the Classification and Varieties of Cats and a Short Treatise Upon Their Care, Diseases, and Treatment (1895). Digitized by the Library of Congress.

Mrs. A. McAllister and Smoke Persian Cat, Bain news Service Publisher, ca.1910-1915. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ggb2005018109/.

Intelligence 

Another point of dissention between cat and dog fans was which was more intelligent. Most believed that dogs were smarter. Author Dorothy Champion sums up the common beliefs and her take:

How often one hears the remark, ‘How stupid cats are!’ or, ‘Cats cannot compare with dogs for cleverness.’ This is a point on which many people make a great mistake… I have come to the conclusion that an uneducated cat has far more brains than an uneducated dog. Doubtless the dog is easier to teach, as he can be made to do things, whereas the cat is of an independent disposition [2].  

Those trying to counter the belief that dogs were smarter had to fiercely defend the intellect of the cat and provide examples to bolster their claim. A common way to do so was to cite their ability to remember how to get from one location to another, even across long distances. However this ability was also turned into a fault, with some authors claiming that cats are more attached to locations than they are to people.

Biggle, Jacob. Biggle Pet Book: A Collection of Information for Old and Young Whose Natural Instincts Teach Them to be Kind to All Living Creatures (1900). Digitized by the Library of Congress.

Domestication 

Another element of comparison between cats and dogs was the extent of their domestication. There are a few ways to approach this topic. One way is to go back and study their original shift from wild to domesticate. New scientific studies using ancient DNA are uncovering clues about the origins of this shift [3]. While the exact details are debated, everyone agrees that cats were domesticated more recently than dogs. In fact, twentieth century authors questioned whether or not cats really have been domesticated at all:

He never was but half-domesticated at best, and while he is a universal favorite with children because of his furry coat and look of seeming intelligence, he is yet essentially a wild animal, almost incapable of true domestication. He has lost little of his innate savagery, and as a relentless foe of birds he has really become an enemy to our civilization[4]. 

While this account is definitely one of the more severe critiques of cats, the sentiment that cats remained wild and were posing a threat to wildlife was gaining popularity in the beginning of the 1900s.

Another way to approach the topic of domestication has to do with nineteenth century conceptions of domesticity. Cats were believed to have a particular affinity for the home, and became associated with the household, and by extension, women. Conversely, dogs were known to travel outside with their owners, tagging along for masculine activities like hunting.

Gos., De Voogt. Our Domestic Animals: Their Habits, Intelligence, and Usefulness (1907). Digitized by the Library of Congress. (Look carefully to see the small kitten curled up beside the large dog).

By comparing their usefulness, intelligence, and domestication, nineteenth and early twentieth century authors debated the merits of cats and dogs in very similar ways that we do today.

Click the links below to access fully digitized volumes of the books mentioned in this post:

• Biggle, Jacob. Biggle Pet Book: A Collection of Information for Old and Young Whose Natural Instincts Teach Them to be Kind to All Living Creatures (1900).
• Champion, Dorothy Bevill. Everybody’s Cat Book (1909). 
• Davenport, Eugene. Domesticated Animals and Plants: A Brief Treatise (1910).
• Forbush, Edward Howe. The domestic cat; bird killer, mouser and destroyer of wild life (1916).
• Shaler, Nathaniel Southgate. Domesticated Animals, Their Relation to Man and His Advancement in Civilization (1895).

Frees, Harry Whittier. “A joy-ride” (1914). Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2013648296/.

*For more information about domestic cats in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see the digital exhibition “Wild Mouser to Household Pet: A History of Cats in Science and Society, 1858 to 1922.”

[1] Nathaniel Southgate Shaler. Domesticated Animals, Their Relation to Man and His Advancement in Civilization (1895). Page 50. Emphasis added.
[2] Champion, Dorothy Bevill. Everybody’s Cat Book (1909). Page 13. Emphasis added.
[3] See for example, Ottoni, C. et al. The palaeogenetics of cat dispersal in the ancient world. Nat. Ecol. Evol. 1, 0139 (2017).
[4] Davenport, Eugene. Domesticated Animals and Plants: A Brief Treatise (1910). Page 235. Emphasis added.

By: Madison Arnold-Scerbo 
Junior Fellow Intern - Science, Technology, & Business Division 
Library of Congress, Washington DC

Cats & Women: Why the Connection?

July 26, 2017, 5:30 am

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This blog post incorporates research conducted for an upcoming digital exhibition called "Wild Mouser to Household Pet: A History of Cats in Science and Society, 1858 to 1922." Click here to check out the exhibition and book collection! 

Cats and women have long been connected in the public imagination. From ancient Egypt, to the Middle Ages, to the turn of the twentieth century, to the present – there has been an association between felines and femininity.

Gos., De Voogt. Our Domestic Animals: Their Habits, Intelligence, and Usefulness (1907). Painting by Henriette Ronner-Knip. Digitized by the Library of Congress.

Pronouns 

One of the most glaring examples of this connection is the choice of pronouns used to describe cats. These examples from nineteenth and early twentieth century books illustrate the tendency to use feminine pronouns for cats:

"If a cat is seen to wash her face with vigor, it is going to be stormy, and if she sits with her back to the fire, it predicts cold weather."[1] 

"The cat has been called the 'perfect pet,' and not without justice. Pussy has always had her friends and her foes; her ardent admirers and her extreme detestors. Faults she has, no doubt, but the lack of an affectionate regard for the person who befriends her is not, as has been alleged, one of them. Though less demonstrative than the dog, the quiet rubbing of her fur against one’s person is no less indicative of supreme regard."[2] 

Conversely, dogs were usually referred to with masculine pronouns.

“Crazy Cat Lady” Trope 

Another example of the link between cats and women is in the ‘crazy cat lady’ trope. In Our Domestic Animals, Their Habits, Intelligence, and Usefulness (1907), the phenomenon is described:

“Yet in certain cities of every country we find persons who push their passion for cats to excess; generally, it must be said, they are elderly dames [women], who establish asylums where neglected, lost, or sick cats may find a refuge. Sometimes these asylums are organized in a practical and sufficient manner, in which case the motive that provided them is laudable; but often they are mere nests of disease and objects of scandal to the neighborhood.” [3] 

This ‘crazy cat lady’ troupe is linked to earlier beliefs in the connection between femininity, witchcraft, and cats. The tradition has also continued on into the twenty-first century: it is common for people to joke about single women who live with cats as crazy or scandalous.

James, Robert Kent. The Angora Cat; How to Breed, Train and Keep It. (1898). Digitized by the Library of Congress.

Cat Shows 

Evening public ledger. (Philadelphia [Pa.]), 12 Dec. 1921. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.

On the other side of the spectrum, women have also been associated with cat shows. The first United States National Cat Show took place in 1871. Women’s societies organized cat shows to raise money for charities, often animal welfare organizations. Newspaper articles from the time announce the upcoming shows and list the names of the exhibitors and organizers, who were mainly women. These shows also incorporated new scientific theories about heredity and breeding, as cat enthusiasts sought to selectively breed cats to develop particular traits, especially coat length and color.

Edna B. Doughty and Louise Grogan with Persian cats. 1920s. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. https://lccn.loc.gov/93502603.

Mrs. A.McAllister and "Smoke Persian" cat. Ca. 1910-1915. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ggb2005018109/.

Another interesting visual representation of the connection between women and cats comes in the photography of Arnold Genthe (1869-1942). In the early twentieth-century, Genthe photographed many celebrities in his studio, posing them with his cat Buzzer. Click here to check out more photographs of Buzzer.

Miss Anna Holch with Buzzer the cat, portrait photograph. Ca 1913. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/agc1996003492/PP/.

But why was there a connection between women and cats? 

In his book, The Cat: An Introduction to the Study of Backboned Animals, Especially Mammals (1881), St. George Jackson Mivart shares one theory:

"The cat also is favoured by that half of the human race which is the more concerned with domestic cares; for it is a home-loving animal and one exceptionally clean and orderly in its habits, and thus naturally commends itself to the good will of the thrifty housewife." [4]

He highlights aspects of cat’s behavior that are seen as feminine in his day: domestic tendencies and cleanliness.

Another possible interpretation involves the intelligence and disposition of cats. In her text, Everybody’s Cat Book (1909), Dorothy Bevill Champion hints at a relationship between women and cats. She writes:

"Cats are very sensitive in disposition, and can easily be frightened by harsh treatment…" [5] 

This description would have been in line with stereotypical descriptions of women. On that same page she writes:

"After the many cases I have seen of cat intelligence, I can only say, if a cat is stupid it is want of education." [6] 

Reading these two quotes together, we see that Champion is making a claim about both cats and women. A central debate of the women’s movement during this time was whether women were as intelligent as men. Many argued that women’s shortcomings were due to less access to education, and not because they were less intelligent. Champion’s claim can therefore be read as a defense of both women and cats.

James, Robert Kent. The Angora Cat; How to Breed, Train and Keep It. (1898). Digitized by the Library of Congress.

Also, cats and women tended to be linked and compared with dogs and men.

“I class the Cat and the Dog to be as distinct in their individuality and with as much difference as you see existing between man and woman."[7] 

For more information about comparisons between cats and dogs, see this blog post.

In the end, these examples show that by the start of the twentieth century, the connection between women and cats was prevalent.

Here are some books about cats written by women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They are digitized on the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

• Lucy Ellen Guernsey. Meat-Eater: With Some Account of Their Haunts and Habits. 1858.  
• Harriet Mann Miller. Funny Friends; or, Queens Pets at Marcy's. 1892.  
• Helen M. Winslow. Concerning Cats; My Own and Some Others. 1907. 
• Dorothy Bevill Champion. Everybody's Cat Book; Containing Chapters on "colour breeding", "showing", "conditioning", "judging", "diseases and their treatment", "how to raise and treat the show and pet cat", and Many Valuable Prescriptions. 1909. 
• Jeanie Oliver Davidson Smith. The Story of Zephyr; A Christmas Story. 1917. 
• Ellen Celty and Anna Ray. Feeding and Care of the Domestic and Long-haired Cat. 1922.  

*For more information about domestic cats in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see the digital exhibition "Wild Mouser to Household Pet: A History of Cats in Science and Society, 1858 to 1922." 

[1] Jacob Biggle. Biggle Pet Book: A Collection of Information for Old and Young Whose Natural Instincts Teach Them to be Kind to All Living Creatures. 1900. Page 56.
[2] Thomas Earl. Pets of the Household; Their Care in Health and Disease. 1895. Page 155.
[3] Gos. De. Voogt. Our Domestic Animals, Their Habits, Intelligence and Usefulness. 1907. Page 83.
[4] St. George Jackson Mivart. The cat: an introduction to the study of backboned animals, especially mammals. 1881. Page 1.
[5] Dorothy Bevill Champion. Everybody’s Cat Book. 1909. Page 15.
[6] Dorothy Bevill Champion. Everybody’s Cat Book. 1909. Page 15.
[7] Marvin Clark. Pussy and her language. 1895. Page 51.

By: Madison Arnold-Scerbo 
Junior Fellow Intern - Science, Technology, & Business Division 
Library of Congress, Washington DC

A Report from the MBLWHOI Library: BHL Supports the Research of Recent Catherine N. Norton Fellows

July 27, 2017, 5:30 am

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The MBLWHOI Library is a founding BHL institution. This post is a brief look at how two of the Library's most recent Catherine N. Norton Fellows have used books from BHL's collection to support their research.

Beatrice Steinert

In 2016, Beatrice Steinert, a recent BA in Biology (2016) from Brown University, was an inaugural Catherine Norton Fellow. Steinert’s project, in conjunction with the History of the Marine Biological Laboratory Project, studied Edwin Grant Conklin's (1863-1952) work in embryology and cell biology.

Conklin documented the stages of embryo development in the marine slipper snail Crepidula fornicata using a camera lucida device. The camera lucida projects the image of a specimen being viewed through a microscope onto paper, which can then be drawn. Steinert duplicated Conklin’s work also using a pencil and a camera lucida. This painstaking process involves successively focusing on portions of an image, thereby gathering 3 dimensional visual data.

Beatrice Steinert speaking at the MBLWHOI Library about drawing cells of marine slipper shells (photo: Matthew Person).

Steinert used both physical texts and BHL content to inform the above mentioned duplication of experimental work performed almost 120 years ago. Conklin’s handwritten Johns Hopkins University digitized doctoral dissertation, The embryology of Crepidula (1891), can be contrasted with the later published full version of the same title (Journal of Morphology v.13 (1897)), by which time Conklin held a professorship in comparative embryology at Johns Hopkins University. Plate IV below is an interesting example of the finished drawings produced using Conklin’s camera lucida sketches.

Stages of embryo development of the marine slipper snail Crepidula fornicata. Conklin, Edwin Grant. Journal of morphology. v. 13 (1897). Digitized by Harvard University, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Ernst Mayr Library. http://s.si.edu/2v0NqZj.

To get a sense of how Conklin worked with a microscope and what he thought about the role of drawing in observational practice, Steinert points to the "Notes and Drawings" section within Conklin’s Laboratory Directions in General Biology:

“Even though this was written [after the publication of his thesis] (there is no date on it, but I think it was written somewhere around 1905-1915) and for pedagogical purposes, it briefly describes in Conklin's own words his approach to seeing/observing through the microscope. Since my project was all his visualization of development in Crepidula, this work was helpful in understanding his process.” 

Regarding Conklin's scientific illustration, Steinert writes:

“While drawing by hand is no longer necessary to generate images of developing embryos, its role as an aid to observation, either from photographs or specimens themselves, still makes it a valuable and relevant skill. Especially for those wanting to learn or develop observation skills, drawing greatly enriches the experience of interacting with an embryo. It actively engages the hand in the act of seeing, heightens spatial awareness, and draws the eye to subtle details that may otherwise be overlooked.” 

Beatrice Steinert’s sketches from Conklin’s Crepidula fornicata slides (Photo by: Beatrice Steinert).

To learn more about Conklin's process and Steinert's work, see this fascinating video produced by the news website STAT:

This video and an accompanying article (by Hyacinth Empinado at STAT News) were published in STAT and Scientific American on February 22nd, 2017.

Sean Cohmer 

Sean Cohmer is the 2017 Catherine Norton Fellowship recipient. He is a PhD candidate and historian at the Center for Biology and Society at Arizona State University. Cohmer studies how the act of making choices about what to bring into the laboratory was rooted in a dramatically shifting context in the late 19th and early 20th century.

As an illustrative example, Cohmer looked closely at the marine organisms that Thomas Hunt Morgan was manipulating and putting under the microscope in the late 19th century before he turned to studying fruit flies. Morgan received the Nobel Prize in 1933 for his work in genetics.

Sean Cohmer speaking at the MBLWHOI Library about Thomas Hunt Morgan (photo: Matt Person).

Cohmer writes:

“I continually look to the Biodiversity Heritage Library for early work published by Thomas Hunt Morgan in the 1880s and 90s. For example, Morgan’s dissertation work was on the embryology and phylogeny (evolutionary relationships) of three genera of sea spiders commonly found in and around Woods Hole, Massachusetts. These were Pallene empusa, Phoxichilidium maxillare, and Tanystylum orbiculare. 

During this era of scientific publication, scientists commonly included lithographic plates as 'fold outs', which typically were diagrams or illustrations. What is so impressive and useful about the books digitized by MBLWHOI Library for the Biodiversity Heritage Library is that they have digitized full-page scans of these wonderful lithographic plates from the original publications. Many other libraries have chosen not to digitize these fold outs and so have missed an opportunity to fully represent the original publication in its entirety. For this reason, I look to the BHL first when doing research in the history of science.”

Morgan’s doctoral dissertation: "Contribution to the embryology and phylogeny of the Pycnogonids." From Studies from the Biological Laboratory v.5:1 (lithograph) Plate 4 (1891). Digitized by the MBLWHOI Library. http://s.si.edu/2uSvlvt.

As Cohmer points out above, the care that BHL has taken to scan all of the “cover to cover content” in books and journals is noticed by researchers who expect digitized copies to reflect the full content of a physical book.

About the Catherine Norton Fellowship

Cathy Norton. Founding Vice-Chair of the Biodiversity Heritage Library and former Director of the MBLWHOI Library.

The late Cathy Norton was the founding vice-chair of the BHL and the Director of the MBLWHOI Library (of the Marine Biological Laboratory and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution). Funding for the Norton Fellowship was endowed by Cathy’s colleagues, friends, and family soon after her passing. The Fellowship celebrates Cathy’s commitment to sharing knowledge and information, her ability to inspire, her “just do it” attitude (an attitude veteran BHL staff members still fondly recall), and her love of a challenge.

The digital History of the Marine Biological Laboratory Project is a collaboration between the MBLWHOI Library and the Center for Biology and Society at Arizona State University. The Project, which celebrates its fifth anniversary in 2017, reflects a decades-long collaboration between Cathy Norton and Professor Jane Maienschein (Director of the Center for Biology and Society at Arizona State University). This relationship promoted history of science research from the physical library stacks to the digital realm in very much the same way the BHL has done for the global corpus of legacy biodiversity literature.

By: Matthew Person
Technical Services Coordinator
Marine Biological Laboratory 
MBLWHOI Library

In-copyright Titles from the 2nd quarter of 2017

August 1, 2017, 6:00 am

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From April to June of this year, BHL received permission for 36 new in-copyright titles, keeping pace with the 39 added in the first quarter. The Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature project, BHL staff, and new members and affiliates all contributed to securing permission and are now working to scan and upload. To put that 36 number in perspective, there are about 650 in-copyright titles in BHL, out of 125,000 total--that's just a half percent, but it's growing!

BHL licenses content under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license

Below are the 36 titles added in the second quarter, in the order permission was secured. For those that have already been scanned or uploaded, links are available. Look for the rest as they're added to the collection; you can check the recent additions, or see all the permission titles available in BHL on the permissions page. Titles in BHL have been digitized/contributed by the rights holders unless otherwise stated.

1. North Carolina Biological Survey and the North Carolina State Museum of Natural Sciences

• A Distributional Survey of North Carolina Mammals
• The Seaside Sparrow, Its Biology and Management
• Atlas of North American Freshwater Fishes (with supplement)
• Autumn Land-bird Migration on the Barrier Islands of Northeastern North Carolina
• Endangered, Threatened, and Rare Fauna of North Carolina (Parts I-IV)
• Research Vessel Dan Moore station logs
• Bird Life of North Carolina's Shining Rock Wilderness
• Fourth Colloquium on Conservation of Mammals of the Southeastern U.S.

2.Florida Ornithological Society

• Florida Field Naturalist (Digitized by Smithsonian Libraries)

3. Delaware Museum of Natural History

• Living Volutes, a Monograph of the Recent Volutidae of the World
• South Pacific Birds
• Woodpeckers of the World
• Ranellidae and Personidae: A Classification of Recent Species
• Philippine Birds

4. New York Botanical Garden

• Advances in Cladistics, v.1 (Digitized by Smithsonian Libraries)

5. Bombay Natural History Society

• Buceros: ENVIS newsletter (Digitized by Smithsonian Libraries)

6. Dr. Peter Shaw Ashton

• Peter S. Ashton papers: field work in Sarawak and Malaysia (Digitized by Harvard University Botany Libraries)

7. Vascular Plant Herbarium, School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University

• Canotia (Digitized by The New York Botanical Garden, LuEsther T. Mertz Library)

8. Northwest Horticultural Society

• Newsletter

9. Hardy Fern Foundation

• Hardy Fern Foundation Newsletter
• Hardy Fern Foundation Quarterly

10. Virginia Native Plant Society

• Bulletin
• Sempervirens

11. Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

• Antarctic Journal 1839-43: Travels papers. Erebus & Terror voyage.(Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker) (Digitized by Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, Library, Art & Archives)

12. University of Washington Botanic Gardens

• Urban Horticulture Presents
• Urban Horticulture
• Camas Quarterly
• E-Flora

13. International Carnivorous Plant Society

• Carnivorous Plant Newsletter

Thank you to the individuals and organizations who have so generously given permission for these titles in support of open access. If there's a title you'd like to see in BHL, let us know here. And don't forget to follow BHL on Facebook, Twitter (@BioDivLibrary), Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr.

Deconstructing Ecological Mirages with Help from Historic Literature

August 3, 2017, 5:30 am

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Within South America’s coastal ecosystems, vast expanses of subtropical and temperate salt marshes are dominated by an iconic species, the smooth salt marsh cordgrass Spartina alterniflora. This species is an important ecological engineer, providing habitats for a wide range of species and shaping the environmental evolution of many coastal ecosystems worldwide.

S. alterniflora is considered native to a wide latitude of the Atlantic coastline from Canada to Argentina, and the Patagonian salt marshes that it dominates are deemed pristine native ecosystems.

However, according to Dr. Alejandro Bortolus, a coastal ecologist, Head of the Grupo de Ecología en Ambientes Costeros at IPEEC-CONICET, and Co-Chair of the X International Conference on Marine Bioinvasions, this is an ecological mirage.

“Although wild and overwhelmingly beautiful, Patagonia is anything but pristine,” asserts Bortolus. “However, the general public and international scientific communities have largely embraced this mythic image of an untouched remote region in the uttermost ends of the Earth. They have come to believe in what I call ‘ecological mirage.’”

Dr. Alejandro Bortolus, during a field trip to the Patagonian salt marshes of San Antonio Bay, completely dominated by the invasive smooth cordgrass Spartina alterniflora. Photo by Dr. Yanina Idaszkin.

For more than a decade, Bortolus and his colleagues have been examining historic records and accounts from early settlers and naturalists, leading to the conclusion that S. alterniflora was actually introduced to South America in the 18th or early 19th century as a result of human activity, transforming what were once intertidal mudflats into the salt marshes seen today.

Bortolus describes this transformation within the Ecological Mirage Hypothesis.

“The Ecological Mirage Hypothesis proposes that a long overlooked historical event -- where an exotic species is introduced to a given region but then mis-interpreted for centuries as native -- may cause unexpected radical shifts in the evolution of the affected ecosystems,” explains Bortolus. “Under such circumstances, even those landscapes deeply associated with the culture and history of a region might not be as pristine as we were led to believe.”

Of course, proposing that these iconic, “pristine” salt marshes are in fact dominated by an introduced bioengineer species has widespread implications. Bortolus and his colleagues, James Carlton and Evangelina Schwindt, needed extensive evidence to support their theory.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library proved to be an invaluable resource for obtaining this evidence, providing easy access to essential rare literature and historic records.

“The review in which the Ecological Mirage Hypothesis was proposed (Bortolus et al. 2015) took nearly a decade to complete,” explains Bortolus. “BHL helped to speed up the work considerably by supplying us with high-quality material impossible to obtain from other sources, including rare first editions, old newspapers, reports, and church accounts, settlers’ diaries, interviews, and personal letters, etc. All of the material is available for anyone to check, double-check and check again from any personal computer in what I consider a portable magical library.”

Bortolus (right foreground with his son Ivan in the backback) leading a research team during the first classification of intertidal environments at Monte Leon National Park, the first National Park with open sea coast in Argentina. Photo by Evan Schwindt.

Bortolus has been studying coastal ecology for over thirty years. His doctoral project involved the first manipulative experiments explicitly focused on the plant-animal interactions shaping the salt marshes of southern South America, including the first experimental evidence recording that herbivore crabs can significantly affect Spartina plants' production and reproduction. Over his career, he also provided the first comparative description of the Patagonian salt marshes, including the “rocky salt marshes” - a unique intertidal hard-bottom ecosystem dominated and characterized by Spartina species. His projects also cover the problems caused by the deficient use of Taxonomy in ecological studies (the "Eco-Taxo Interface").

Neohelice granulata, a semi-terrestrial intertidal herbivore and burrowing crab species studied by Bortolus during his doctorate. Photo by A. Bortolus.

BHL has been supporting Bortolus’ work since he first discovered it around 2007 after a routine Internet keyword search led him to the Library.

“I was astonished by the fact that BHL could provide me not only with classic records two or three centuries old, but also with publications written by Argentina’s pioneers of Botany, some of which I was struggling to find in the libraries of my own country,” lauds Bortolus. “In a matter of seconds, meticulously scanned publications supplied by some of the largest scientific institutions worldwide were there for me to use…and for free!”

Today, Bortolus uses BHL regularly as part of his research process. The Library has significantly improved the efficiency of his work.

“Before I discovered BHL, I was sending paper cards through the regular international mail to request the literature I needed - a process that normally took between 6 and 9 months for me to get the material (if I succeeded at all),” recalls Bortolus. “BHL is an excellent, unique initiative that creates a virtuous circle in which scientific knowledge is available to those who need it the most, helping them to produce more knowledge and bridging geographic and cultural frontiers as if they don't exist.”

The information Bortolus has gleaned from BHL not only provides a new understanding of the forces that shaped South America’s coastal ecosystems over the last centuries, but also underscores the importance of historical documents when designing conservation strategies to protect “native” species. “Natural” is not always what it seems.

“Historical records make one realize that even the most significant scientific findings can fade away, independently of how revealing they are,” explains Bortolus. “I feel that finding and bringing back those forgotten discoveries and ideas to analyze and re-discuss them is one of my highest responsibilities as a scientist. For anyone trying to achieve that goal, BHL is a dream come true.”

Bortolus in Canada during a visit searching for invasive austral cordgrass Spartina densiflora, invited by US Fish and Wildlife Service ecologist Andrea Pickart. Photo by A. Pickart.

Learn more about Bortolus’ work in these publications (www.geaccenpat.wixsite.com/geac):

• Bortolus, A. and Schwindt E. 2007. What would have Darwin written now? Biodiversity and Conservation. 16:337–345 
• Bortolus, A., J.T. Carlton and E. Schwindt. 2016. Biological Invasions change the way we see Nature. Bare Essentials.1-5. 
•  Bortolus, A., J.T. Carlton and E. Schwindt. 2015. Reimagining South American coasts: unveiling the hidden invasion history of an iconic ecological engineer. Diversity and Distributions. 21:1267-1283.

Learn more about the X International Conference on Marine Bioinvasions, which will be held in Puerto Madryn from 16-18 October 2018, here: http://www.marinebioinvasions.info.

By Grace Costantino
Outreach and Communication Manager
Biodiversity Heritage Library
______________________________________

This post may contain the personal opinions of BHL users or affiliated staff and does not necessarily represent the official Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) position on these matters.

Update re: Internet Archive Outage 8/4/2017.

August 4, 2017, 4:33 am

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Thank you for your patience!

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Status Posted 7:30am ET on 8/4/2017:
Internet Archive is experiencing an outage on 4 August 2017. As a result, page images are not displaying in BHL. We apologize for the inconvenience, and we will update this post and social media as the status changes. Thank you for your patience and #StayTuned.

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Report on the XIX International Botanical Congress, Shenzhen, China, July 2017

August 9, 2017, 6:05 am

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XIX IBC 2017

By Martin R. Kalfatovic
BHL Program Director

Along with BHL Program Manager Carolyn Sheffield, I represented BHL as a delegate to the XIX International Botanical Congress in Shenzhen, China. Held during the week of 24-28 July 2017, the Congress (which is held every five years) drew over 6,000 botanists from around the world.

The Congress provided an excellent opportunity to catch up with colleagues from around the world and learn about some of the latest botanical research.

SHENZHEN DECLARATION AND PUBLIC TALKS 

IBC logos on Shenzhen skyline

The program was divided into plenary talks, keynote talks, general symposia, and public lectures (see abstracts for all here). The Congress opened with a public lecture by Peter H. Raven, President Emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden. Raven's talk, "Saving Plants to Save Ourselves: The Shenzhen Declaration" was on the public announcement of the Shenzhen Declaration on Plant Sciences. Authored by fourteen illustrious botanists that formed the Shenzhen Declaration Drafting Committee, the declaration is an important statement on the role of plant science in a changing world. The declaration opens with:

"Actions and priorities to connect the global community of plant scientists with the world’s changing societies are today more imperative than ever. Environmental degradation, unsustainable resource use, and biodiversity loss all require integrated, collaborative solutions."

Noting the changing world we inhabit, the change evidenced by increased species extinction, global climate change, rapid changes in the practice of plant science, and refactoring of the world's economy, the declaration outlines seven priorities for strategic action in the plant sciences. These priorities will "allow society, with the help of science, to mitigate impacts of human activities on plant species, habitats, and distributions, and to approach formation of a sustainable world for ourselves and those who follow us."

These seven priorities are:

• To become responsible scientists and research communities who pursue plant sciences in the context of a changing world. 
• To enhance support for the plant sciences to achieve global sustainability. 
• To cooperate and integrate across nations and regions and to work together across disciplines and cultures to address common goals. 
• To build and use new technologies and big data platforms to increase exploration and understanding of nature. 
• To accelerate the inventory of life on Earth for the wise use of nature and the benefit of humankind.  
• To value, document, and protect indigenous, traditional, and local knowledge about plants and nature. 
• To engage the power of the public with the power of plants through greater participation and outreach, innovative education, and citizen science. 

Raven's inspiring talk on the Declaration was a brilliant opening to the Congress (and was touched upon by nearly all speakers for the remainder of the Congress) and concluded with a rousing call to action: "Let us make this Congress a time of commitment to do better and resolutely seek a sound and sustainable future for all people."

Sandra Knapp

Another public lecture of note was by Sandra Knapp (Natural History Museum, London): "People and Plants -- the Unbreakable Bond". Knapp noted "Plants form the scaffold for Earth’s green ecosystems, but they are also essential for human survival. Plants provide most of the food we eat (directly or indirectly), our medicines, clothes, buildings, and even the air we breathe; they also beautify our daily lives." Knapp further detailed the importance of plants to humans and then pivoted to ask, "So we need plants, but do they need us?" Knapp's answer was yes:

"In this time of increasing human impact on plants, animals and natural habitats, our actions can make a big difference in whether plants are a part of an ecological civilization for the future. Plants do in fact need us - they need us to study and use them responsibly, both as scientists and as members of human societies."

KEYNOTE AND PLENARY TALKS 

The Congress presented a number of excellent keynote and plenary talks. Of special note were the following:

"Tropical Plant-Animal Interactions: Coevolution in the Anthropocene" by W. John Kress (Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History). Kress illustrated his talk with research on the interaction of beetles, humming birds, and Zingiberales (including bananas, birds-of-paradise, heliconias, gingers, and prayer plants). Kress concluded with, "The geographic mosaic of these relationships across tropical islands, fragmented landscapes, and elevational gradients suggests that human-caused habitat alterations, biological invasions, and climate change may significantly modify and disrupt through time and space the historical patterns of ecological interactions. The future of today’s biological complexity in the Age of Humans, in the Anthropocene, remains to be determined."

W. John Kress

"International developments and responsibilities for the botanical community in plant conservation" by Peter Wyse Jackson (Missouri Botanical Garden). Wyse Jackson provided a high level overview of the importance of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC), part of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, and showed how individual institutions can help achieve the 2020 targets of the GSPC. He specifically noted how the Missouri Botanical Garden is working in the areas of conservation biology, ecological restoration, community conservation and education programs, horticulture and ex situ conservation towards this end. The World Flora Online project, based at the Missouri Botanical Garden and with partners worldwide, was previewed at the Congress and is a first target of the GSPC.

Peter Wyse Jackson

"Mapping Asia Plants" by Keping Ma (Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences). Ma provided an excellent overview of a number of resources that are helping to document plant life in Asia. Ma commented, "Because of the huge population and rapid growth of economy, biodiversity including plants are being seriously threatened in Asia." He also detailed the work of the Asia Biodiversity Conservation and Databases Network (ABCDNet) project, entitled Mapping Asia Plants for cataloguing species of plants and collecting distribution data. The importance of the Biodiversity Heritage Library China (BHL China) in providing access to literature was noted.

Keping Ma

"Developing integrative systematics in the informatics and genomic era" by Jun Wen (Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History). "Systematics is the science of discovering, organizing and interpreting the diversity of all living organisms on Earth. Recent developments in genomics and biodiversity informatics are transforming systematics and have opened up many new opportunities." With that statement, Wen outlined the opportunities of big data, digitization, and genomics in developing the tree of life. The wider importance of this work was driven home as Wen noted "integrative systematics must proactively educate the public and policy makers on the importance of systematics and collections in the biodiversity crisis of the Anthropocene."

Jun Wen

"Thinking through the e- in e-Floras; or, Floras old, new, and not-yet" by Kevin Thiele (Western Australian Herbarium). Thiele delivered an provocative talk that touched upon the very core of how plant scientists do their work and to what level much of the scientific output is wedded to 19th century methods of dissemination while we are living well into the 21st century. He illustrated this with how many "e-floras" simply reproduce print methodologies. He challenged the audience to consider, "If modern taxonomy and systematics were invented, or re-invented, now (in the age of the internet, social media, citizen science and the block chain), rather than in the 18th Century, would we do it all differently?"

Kevin Thiele

In perhaps the most inspirational talk of the Congress, Stephen Blackmore (Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh) spoke on the seemingly simple topic, "Saving Plants". Blackmore drew on his personal experience in Pearl River Delta area to tie together the different sectors and stakeholders that are needed to create a world where plants, and by extension, humans, can both survive and thrive. Blackmore focused on the contributions of botanic gardens, arboreta, seed banks and other collections of living and preserved plants to achieve the goal of saving plants. Blackmore ended on the note that "we will need to work closely together if we are to succeed in passing on the Earth’s rich, green inheritance to future generations."

Stephen Blackmore

BIODIVERSITY HERITAGE LIBRARY SYMPOSIUM 

Speakers at the BHL Symposium

For the Congress, I, along with Carolyn Sheffield, organized a general symposium, "The Biodiversity Heritage Library: Empowering Discovery through Free Access to Biodiversity Knowledge" with colleagues from the Biodiversity Heritage Library's global partners. Presenters at the symposium were:

• The Biodiversity Heritage Library: Empowering Discovery through Free Access to Biodiversity Knowledge | Martin R. Kalfatovic (Biodiversity Heritage Library / Smithsonian Libraries) 
• Real use cases for Semantic Information in BHL | William Ulate (Center for Biodiversity Informatics, IT Department, Missouri Botanical Garden) 
• A Checklist of the Orders and Families of Medicinal Plants in the Philippines | Harold Carag (The Graduate School, University of the Philippines, Los Banos) 
• The Development and Progress of BHL China | Zheping Xu (Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences) 
• The Challenges of a Botanical Library in the Tropics and the Need for Restoration and Digitisation of Materials | Nura Abdul Karim (Singapore Botanic Gardens, National Parks Board) 
• Building Botanical Literature Collections for Global Use: Highlights from the Biodiversity Heritage Library | Carolyn Sheffield (Biodiversity Heritage Library / Smithsonian Libraries)  

OTHER SYMPOSIA 

Many familiar colleagues participated in the General Symposium, "Green digitization: online botanical collections data answering real-world questions", organized by Shelley A James (Florida Museum of Natural History, USA) and Gil Nelson (Florida State University, USA).

Talks at the symposium included:

• Rebranding botanical collections: Global societal and biodiversity data needs for novel research | Shelley James 
• Invasive or Not? A collection-based investigation of a historically unseen, persistent green algal bloom on Pacific coral reefs | Tom Schils [unable to present] 
• Current status and the applications of online botanical collection data in China | Zheping Xu 
• Virtual Herbaria tracking usage and benefits for biological collections: An example from Australasia | David Cantrill 
• Developing standards for scoring phenology from herbarium specimens | Jenn Yost 
• From field collections to digital data: A workflow and digitization pipeline for reconstruction of a fossil flora | Dori Contreras [delivered in abstentia] 

OTHER ACTIVITIES 

Artron (photo by Ivan Lee @ Artron)

A number of excursions were organized for delegates. I participated in one excursion that highlighted the hi-tech industry that has led to Shenzhen growing from a small fishing village to a world-class city with a population of 15 million in less than 40 years. The first stop was at UBTECH, a robotics start-up company that markets a robot that can interact with digital assistants (such as the Amazon Alexa). The next stop was Nirvana for this former art librarian: Artron, a world-class printer that produces art books and catalogs for the museums and galleries of the world. We visited their library and exhibition spaces. The focal point of the facility was the "Wall of Art Books." Over 150,000 art books are on display in a four story space (that has to be experience to be believed). All books are available to view by members of the Artron private library. We visited the private library, consisting of 20 themed rooms (e.g. "Japanese Vintage Books" and "The Business of Art") as well as the main reading room with a touch pad catalog where readers can page books (after pre-viewing full-text digitized versions). After leaving the Artron facility, I couldn't help but imagine this is how the brick and mortar library of the future will look.

My second excursion was more on a botanical point. The Fairy Lake Botanical Garden is a 546 ha botanical garden which compares favorably with the great gardens of the world. First stop was the shade garden and butterfly pavilion, followed by the Fairy Lake and the palm area. We also had the opportunity to visit the National Cycad Conservation Center, which includes a fabulous collection of cycads from around the world and also a fossil collection. The Fairy Lake Botanical Garden also has a spectacular petrified forest area, with huge amounts of petrified wood that have been "planted" to look like a forest. We also stopped in at the Shenzhen Paleontological Museum (some dinosaurs and nice trilobites, my favorite extinct invertebrate!).

With Sandra Knapp and Peter Raven

The Congress featured a mid-week Gala that provided an opportunity to recognize the work of organizers and the program committee. The Gala also showcased a wide variety of Chinese entertainment that ranged from classical instrumentalists, to dancers and acrobats, to a Chinese doo-wop group. The accompanying buffet featured a number of tasty offerings.

IN SUMMARY 

The XIX International Botanical Congress was a unique opportunity for the Biodiversity Heritage Library to meet with colleagues from around the world (and from down the hall) to discuss important issues related to plant science and how we, as librarians, can work with plant scientists to accelerate their work and to achieve the aspirational goals as outlined in the Shenzhen Declaration.

XIX IBC 2017 at Night

Ex. Ex. Marks the Spot: bringing together primary and secondary sources on the United States South Seas Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842

August 10, 2017, 5:00 am

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Written by Adriana Marroquin
Project Manager, BHL Field Notes Project and Smithsonian Field Book Project

The United States South Seas Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842 was authorized by Congress in 1836 to observe the Pacific Ocean and South Seas. The four-year voyage — also referred to as the Wilkes Expedition or Ex. Ex. for shorthand — covered an expansive geographic region, including the Pacific Northwest, Fiji Islands, and South America. The expedition was under the command of Lieutenant Charles Wilkes of the Unites States Navy, and the resulting collection is thought to be one of the largest early natural history collections, weighing in at an estimated 40 tons. The collection was transferred to the Smithsonian Institution in 1857 and established what would eventually become the National Museum of Natural History. A narrative of the expedition was published in 1844, with a multi-volume publication on the results of the expedition published later.

Wilkes, Charles. United States Exploring Expedition. During the year 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842. Vol. 1 (1845). http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/21175563.

As we have mentioned before, it was an interest in identifying the original source material for the Ex. Ex. which really became a major incentive to establish what would become the Smithsonian Field Book Project. Over the course of the project, team members cataloged the Ex. Ex. field books in Smithsonian Institution Archives' collection. Now as the Smithsonian Field Book Project team participates in the BHL Field Notes Project, this collection of original expedition notes is being digitized and published in BHL, giving researchers a way to view related content in one place.

Brackenridge, William D. Original notebooks of the botanist, volumes 13 - 14, Fiji Islands group. (1838-1842) http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/53612590.

One of the sets of material SIA has digitized as part of the BHL Field Notes Project are the notebooks of William D. Brackenridge. Brackenridge was a gardener and nurseryman from Scotland who moved to the United States in 1837. Brackenridge became part of the Ex. Ex. as a result of Asa Gray resigning as Botanist of the expedition to take an academic position at the newly established University of Michigan. With Gray’s departure, William Rich was promoted from Assistant Botanist to Botanist, and Brackenridge was brought on to fill the assistantship role.

Drayton, Joseph. Botany: Echinoderms, drawings by Joseph Drayton. (1838-1839) http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/53640152.

Also part of the expedition team were two illustrators, Joseph Drayton and Alfred T. Agate. As part of the BHL Field Notes Project, we have digitized a set of sea star and other marine drawings by Drayton. The drawings include a signature and date, and often additional notes on the location where the specimen was found. As far as we can tell, these illustrations were not used for reference in the multi-volume Expedition publication, making this set of drawings a particularly good example of how field notes can inform research in conjunction with traditionally published material.

Smithsonian Institution Archives still has several field books from the Ex. Ex. to digitize for the BHL Field Notes Project, so be sure to check back over the next few months to see our whole set.


The BHL Field Notes Project is funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR).


References: 
Finding Aid for “SIA RU007189, Brackenridge, William D (William Dunlop) 1810-1893, William Dunlop Brackenridge Papers, circa 1838-1875” 

Finding Aid for “SIA RU007186, United States Exploring Expedition (1838-1842), United States Exploring Expedition Collection, 1838-1885”

Philbrick, Nathaniel. “The Scientific Legacy of the U.S. Exploring Expedition.” The United States Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842, a Smithsonian Libraries Digital Collection. 

Walsh, Dr. Jane. “From the Ends of the Earth: The United States Exploring Expedition Collections”.” The United States Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842, a Smithsonian Libraries Digital Collection. 

The Delaware Museum of Natural History

August 17, 2017, 6:00 am

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Image adapted from a photo by Jim, the Photographer. Original on Flickr. (CC BY 2.0)

History

For over 40 years, the Delaware Museum of Natural History (DMNH) has promoted the study of nature, investigated the planet's flora and fauna, and educated the public with its world-class collections, which are particularly rich in mollusks and birds (DMNH's collection of bird eggs is the second-largest in North America).

"The Egg Collection" Photo by Jim, the Photographer on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Founded in 1957, the museum began as an idea in the mind of John duPont, heir to the DuPont Chemical fortune. An avid naturalist, duPont travelled the world and amassed a collection of 113,000 birds and 2 million seashells. He used a portion of land from his family's estate to found the museum that houses his collections. It opened to the public in 1972.

Long after his involvement with DMNH had ended, duPont moved his attention to athletics. He used some of his fortune to open a training center for Olympic athletes on his sprawling estate in Pennsylvania. The athletes, trainers, and coaches who worked for him were known as Team Foxcatcher and enjoyed considerable success. As years went on, however, duPont's behavior became increasingly erratic. His deterioration came to a head in January of 1996, when, for reasons unknown, he shot and killed his star wrestling coach, Olympic gold medalist Dave Schultz. This tragic story was (loosely) told in the 2014 film Foxcatcher.

Publications and Rare Books

Birds, shells, and mammals aren't the only things that John duPont put in the DMNH; he also contributed a library with an excellent collection of rare books. DMNH recently contributed some of these books to BHL through the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL) project, which works with organizations across the U.S. to digitize unique and valuable material. The DMNH-contributed books include rare works from the 18th century and publications by the museum, including several works by duPont himself. Below are some highlights; the complete list can be found here and here.

1. Index testarvm conchyliorvm quae adservantvr in mvseo Nicolai Gvaltieri (1742)

Niccolò Gualtieri was an Italian doctor, malacologist, and professor at the University of Pisa, whose collection of shells is the oldest in the university's natural history museum. Particularly noteworthy in his Index testarvm conchyliorvm are his descriptions of argonauts, also called paper nautiluses.

Plates from Gualtieri's Index: L: T.36, Conch shells (Strombidae); R: T.18, Nautilus.

2. Woodpeckers of the World(Monograph Series No. 4, 1982)

Lester L. Short, born in 1933, is one of the world's foremost experts on woodpeckers (family Picidae). A former curator of birds at the American Museum of Natural History, Short travelled to over 60 countries documenting woodpeckers and in 1986 was one of the last people to see a Cuban Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Campephilus principalis bairdii, in the wild. The bird is now believed to be extinct. 

Short's Woodpeckers of the Worldwas written with the encouragement and support of John duPont; in fact, duPont arranged for his illustrator, George Sandström, to work with Short to produce the 101 color plates in the book.

Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, illustrated by George Sandström. From Woodpeckers of the World (1982), p. 621: http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/53631011

3. Philippine Birds(Monograph Series No. 2, 1971) 

John duPont wrote this book based on his own expeditions to the Philippines, beginning in 1958. In the foreword to the book, ornithologist Dean Amadon writes that "anyone who knows John duPont will realize that, once in the islands, he heads for the nearest mountains and jungles: he is not one to dawdle about in the gardens of local officials."Philippine Birds was written as an identification guide rather than a comprehensive work, with brief descriptions accompanying color illustrations by George Sandström.

Pittas (family Pittidae), illustrated by George Sandström. From Philippine Birds (1971), plate 49: http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/53630110

Jean Woods, Curator of Birds at DMNH, worked with the EABL team to digitize these titles and get them into the BHL collection. Discussing the importance of putting them online, she said, “We’re excited to have the museum’s publications and rare books available through the Biodiversity Heritage Library to be used by researchers that have not previously had access to them.” She added that some of the titles, like Philippine Birds, have been out of print for years and that "many of the rare mollusk books contain original species descriptions which continue to be essential for taxonomic work." 

We are grateful to Jean and to the Delaware Museum of Natural History for so generously sharing their wealth of publications and rare books with the BHL community. 

By Patrick Randall
Community Manager
Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature

References

About us. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.delmnh.org/about-us-2/

Eckholm, E. (1986, May 5). Woodpecker, believed extinct, seen in Cuba. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/1986/05/05/us/woodpecker-believed-extinct-seen-in-cuba.html

Longman, J. (2010, December 9). John E. du Pont, heir who killed an Olympian, dies at 72. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/sports/olympics/10dupont.html?_r=0

Niccolò Gualtieri's splendid seashells. (2016, August 26). Retrieved from http://www.italianways.com/niccolo-gualtieris-splendid-seashells/

The Final Contribution of Sir William Jardine, Scottish Ornithologist

August 24, 2017, 5:30 am

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Jardine’s parrot or red-fronted parrot (Poicephalus gulielmi). Drawn from a specimen brought back from the Congo by Jardine’s son William, for whom it was named. Jardine, William. Contributions to Ornithology, Vol. 2. Edinburgh :W.H. Lizars, 1848-1853. Digitized by the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, Library and Archives. http://s.si.edu/2xpPC9Z.

As was the case for many of his contemporaries, Sir William Jardine, 7th Baronet of Applegarth, was a man of many talents. Ichthyology, botany, entomology and geology were all subjects in which Sir William was thoroughly knowledgeable, but it was ornithology that was his true passion.

It was out of this passion that Jardine produced two original works on ornithology: Illustrations of Ornithology and the annual periodical Contributions to Ornithology. Just five volumes of Contributions were produced from 1848-1852; the Academy of Natural Science’s library copy is bound in three volumes. Contributions is not only the first ornithological periodical produced in Britain, but one of Jardine’s finest natural history works...and his last.

Two examples of the genus Todirostrum, drawn by Catherine Strickland. Jardine, William. Contributions to Ornithology, Vol. 5. Edinburgh :W.H. Lizars, 1848-1853. Digitized by the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, Library and Archives. http://s.si.edu/2vVN8lQ.

Born in Edinburgh on the 23rd of February, 1800 to Sir Alexander Jardine, 6th Baronet of Applegarth, and Jane Maule, Sir William Jardine grew up in a world of relative wealth and privilege. Not only was he afforded a title, but he stood to inherit Jardine Hall, a stately home located on an estate of over 5,000 acres of land along the banks of the River Annan. At the age of 18, he began medical training at Edinburgh University. Although his intended path was that of a medical doctor, his friendship with the school’s janitor and preserver of specimens for the university museum led him to his true calling of ornithology.

Upon his father’s death in 1821, Jardine not only inherited a title and an estate, but the necessary funds to purchase the ornithological specimens which would become the basis of his renowned collection, which would grow to over 12,000 skins. Despite his newfound obligations as Baronet, including overseeing over 900 parishioners and 11 farms, Jardine found ample time to produce several notable works on ornithology and other subjects.

The blue-bearded bee-eater (Nyctyornis athertoni). William Jardine and Prideaux John Selby. Illustrations of ornithology, Vol. 2. Dublin :Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, & Green, and S. Highley, [1826-1835]. Digitized by Smithsonian Libraries. http://s.si.edu/2wvltJV.

The first of these works, Illustrations of Ornithology, was a collaboration with fellow ornithologist Prideaux John Selby detailing non-British birds from around the world. Jardine and Selby saw a deficiency in previously published works on the subject, which typically only included an example from each genus. The work was organized mainly by Jardine, who also took on the Herculean task of obtaining the specimens from which the work’s illustrations would be produced. Jardine enlisted the help of 3 dealers, 12 collectors, and 4 naturalists from around the world in order to obtain the necessary specimens. The work was produced in three volumes from 1825 to 1835.

In 1848, Jardine embarked on what was to be his finest and last work, Contributions to Ornithology, an annual work which detailed recent advances in ornithology. Contributions was created from the efforts of multiple members of the Jardine clan. While Jardine was responsible for organizing the work and writing a majority of the text, he also had the assistance of his daughter Catherine’s husband, Hugh E. Strickland. Strickland helped expedite the production of the work while contributing multiple articles. It was Hugh E. Strickland himself that presented the Academy’s copy of Contributions to Ornithology.

Catherine was a keen illustrator and produced at least 42 of the 94 illustrations that appeared in Contributions. While Catherine had previously provided many illustrations for her father’s works, this was the first instance in which her initials appeared on the final printing.

Juvenile bird and eggs, drawn by Catherine Strickland. Jardine, William. Contributions to Ornithology, Vol. 5. Edinburgh :W.H. Lizars, 1848-1853. Digitized by the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, Library and Archives. http://s.si.edu/2vVS5uL.

Jardine’s son William, a world traveler, sent his father many specimens to be included in the publication. Jardine’s brother in-law, W.H. Lizars, did the engravings.

The illustrations found in Contributions were perhaps the most remarkable element of the work. In addition to Catherine’s illustrations, Jardine also was responsible for some of the plates. It is also possible that one of Jardine’s other daughters, Helen, produced some plates or backgrounds for the work. The illustrations were created by a variety of means, including etching, lithography, and the relatively new papyrography. Jardine was so taken with the new method of papyrography that the first volume of Contributions included instructions on how the layman might achieve this method.

Crested owl (Lophostrix cristata) drawn by Catherine Strickland using papyrography. Her initials can be seen near the bottom of the illustration. Jardine, William. Contributions to Ornithology, Vol. 1. Edinburgh :W.H. Lizars, 1848-1853. Digitized by the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, Library and Archives. http://s.si.edu/2wBouYm.

The first article to appear in Contributions demonstrated Jardine’s desire and need for a plethora of new foreign bird specimens. “Hints for preparing and transmitting ornithological specimens from foreign countries” provided travelers, who might have previously abstained from collecting specimens due to lack of knowledge, with instruction on the tools and skills needed to produce bird specimens. Not only were step-by-step instructions on how to preserve birds provided, but also how to retain crucial observations about the bird.

Contributions also included articles by the who’s who of ornithologists of the day. John Gould contributed multiple times, including an article on three new species of hummingbirds, a topic on which he would later dedicate an entire work to. Charles Lucien Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon, would also contribute a text on finches.

The production of Contributions was cut short in 1852 by the untimely death of Strickland, who had been struck by a train. His death devastated the two other principal organizers of the work, Jardine and Catherine Strickland. Jardine saw in Strickland a successor, someone who had the same interest in natural history that his sons did not. Jardine was so affected by Strickland’s death that he never produced another natural history work, only Strickland’s memoirs.

By Kelsey Manahan
Library Assistant 
Academy Library and Archives 
Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University

References

• Jackson, Christine E. and Peter Davis. Sir William Jardine: A Life in Natural History. New York, NY: Leicester University Press, 2001. 
• Jardine, William. Contributions to Ornithology. Edinburgh: W.H. Lizars,1848-1853. 
• The Late Sir William Jardine. (1874). Nature, 11, p. 74.

Artist Kumataro Ito Aboard the USS Albatross

August 31, 2017, 5:00 am

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This post was originally published on The Field Book Project blog on 30 June 2017.

Bartsch, Paul. Notes and description of specimens collected on the Philippine Expedition of the Steamer Albatross, circa 1908. Illustration by Kumataro Ito. Digitized by Smithsonian Institution Archives. http://s.si.edu/2wm30MY.

In 1907, the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries—now known as NOAA Fisheries or the National Marine Fisheries Service—embarked on a 2 ½ year research trip to the Philippine and neighboring islands. Of the many research trips conducted on their steamer the USS Albatross, the Philippine expedition resulted in a staggering estimate of 490,000 specimens turned over to the U.S. National Museum, what is now the National Museum of Natural History. When specimens are stored in ethanol, as these were, they do not retain their original coloring. To capture this information, these trips would also include efforts to document the specimens in other ways, such as photos or illustrations.

At the time of this expedition, a portable, reliable way to create quality color photographs was still several decades away, so it wasn’t an option for researchers in the field. Having an artist on board was the only option to capture the brilliant colors of the collected marine species. For this particular outing of the Albatross, Tokyo-based artist Kumataro Ito was hired to illustrate specimens collected by researchers.

Ito studied under Gyozan Nakajima, noted illustrator of the 19th century, and had already established himself as a natural history painter at Department of Zoology of Tokyo University and working on publications such as the Fishes of Japan, an account principally on economic species.

Bartsch, Paul. Notes and description of specimens collected on the Philippine Expedition of the Steamer Albatross, circa 1908. Illustration by Kumataro Ito. Digitized by Smithsonian Institution Archives. http://s.si.edu/2iFc64e.

Over the course of the expedition, Ito created over 200 paintings of specimens collected by the small research crew, including mollusks collected by Smithsonian’s Paul Bartsch. Last month, our team digitized one of Bartsch’s notebooks from the expedition. The notebook caught our eye from the first time we saw it because of the beautiful full-color paintings of nudibranchs, all by Ito. Each painting includes notations in Japanese which supplement Bartsch’s notes. Based on how well the paintings have aged, it’s likely they were created on quality Japanese paper similar to what is used today for book repairs.

Bartsch, Paul. Notes and description of specimens collected on the Philippine Expedition of the Steamer Albatross, circa 1908. Illustration by Kumataro Ito. Digitized by Smithsonian Institution Archives. http://s.si.edu/2wgmjsR.

Unfortunately, Ito’s paintings often went unattributed or incorrectly credited to the researcher when later reproduced in publications. It’s a shame considering the clear talent Ito had in capturing the diversity of marine life. The nudibranch paintings in the Bartsch notebook are an incredible sight and we are pleased they are now available to view online, with proper credit to Kumataro Ito.

Bartsch, Paul. Notes and description of specimens collected on the Philippine Expedition of the Steamer Albatross, circa 1908. Illustration by Kumataro Ito. Digitized by Smithsonian Institution Archives. http://s.si.edu/2vClXJY.

By Adriana Marroquin 
Project Manager 
The Smithsonian Field Book Project 

Digitization of this field book was sponsored by a grant from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Peter Baldwin and Lisbet Rausing. 

Further Reading:

• Bennett, William. “An Undersea Invertebrates Update: Treatment Progress on Bartsch’s Nudibranchs Field Book.” Smithsonian Institution Archives blog. May 18, 2017. 
• Bennett, William. “Coming Soon to the Transcription Center: Department of Invertebrate Zoology.” Smithsonian Institution Archives blog. November 15, 2016. 
• Springer, Victor G. “Kumataro Ito, Japanese Artist on Board the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries Steamer Albatross During the Philippine Expedition, 1907-1910.” Marine Fisheries Review 61, no.4 (1999): 42-57. 
• Bartsch, Paul. "Dr. Hugh M. Smith, Director of the Philippine Cruise of the "Albatross""Copeia 1941, no. 4 (1941): 209-15.