All posts tagged with imls

John Sibthorp’s Flora Graeca (1806-1840) has been described as “the most costly and beautiful book devoted to any flora” [1]. Dedicated to the plants of Greece and the eastern Mediterranean, only 30 subscriptions were sold and of those, only 25 were completed. While each copy was sold for £254, the cost to produce each copy was about £620 [2, 176].

More volumes from the Wilson Ornithological Society are now on BHL!  Spanning back to 1893, the publications The Wilson Bulletin and The Wilson Journal of Ornithology are a great example of the kind of legacy literature that distinguishes BHL.

The Wilson Ornithological Society is the second largest ornithological society in North America. The organization of professional scientists and dedicated amateurs is named for Alexander Wilson, known as the “Father of American Ornithology”.

The Wilson Journal of Ornithology is a quarterly peer-reviewed journal that replaces its predecessor, The Wilson Bulletin. BHL had previously added some earlier public domain volumes of The Wilson Bulletin, but was able to expand the collection thanks to the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL) project, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The Wilson Ornithological Society granted permission to share these titles on BHL with a 5-year embargo on the most recently published volumes, so that now BHL has The Bulletin from 1894-2005 and The Journal from 2006-2010.

On January 4, 2018, in the midst of a memorable storm in the Northeastern US, approximately 30 intrepid travelers met to celebrate the successful completion of the BHL National Digital Stewardship Residencies developed for the IMLS, Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian grant submission: Foundations to Actions: Extending Innovations in Digital Libraries in Partnership with NDSR Learners.  The program plan included hiring five geographically-distributed residents, all graduates of LIS or related master’s programs, to work on collaborative projects to improve tools, curation, and content stewardship for BHL. This work supported BHL development plans for the next generation portal for the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature.

In November, four of our BHL NDSR residents delivered webinars reporting on the results of their research and recommendations on how we might best improve the features and functionality of BHL to incorporate new technologies and evolving best practices for digital libraries and the larger biodiversity community.

We are pleased to announce five webinars from BHL’s NDSR residents! Each resident has spent the past 10 months or so working hard on individual—yet inter-related—research projects to explore how we might best improve the features and functionality of BHL to incorporate new technologies and evolving best practices for digital libraries and the larger biodiversity community.  Each resident will be delivering a webinar, reporting on the results of their research to date along with their recommendations for BHL. You can find details and links to recordings of all of the webinars below.

Over the course of the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL) project, contributing organizations have shipped material to Internet Archive scanning centers around the country. A few have scanned their own material, and a few more have used third-party commercial services. One EABL contributor did things a little differently.

Betsy Kruthoffer, Librarian and Rare Books Cataloger at the Lloyd Library and Museum, selected a number of important titles from the library’s collection that were not in BHL. After weighing various scanning options, she got in touch with the digital lab at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County (PLCH), which had done good work for a Lloyd patron the previous year (and, conveniently, is located right down the street). PLCH agreed to do the scanning, with the understanding that the digitized books would also be made available in a PLCH online collection.

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). Founded in 1957, the museum began as an idea in the mind of John duPont, heir to the DuPont Chemical fortune.