Description
This blog is written by staff writers who come from a consortium 14 of major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions around the world. These institutions have joined forces to form the Biodiversity Heritage Library, a digital library providing open free access to digitized texts from the taxonomic corpus. Participating libraries include Harvard's University's Ernst Mayr Library, Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and the California Academy of Sciences, just to name a few. They have over two million volumes of biodiversity literature, collected over 200 years to support the work of scientists, researchers, and students in their home institutions and throughout the world.
Biodiversity Heritage Library's Latest Posts
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Schott, Gaspar. Physica Curiosa (1662).From Superstition to Scientific ReasoningThe seventeenth century was a time of great advancement for science, but it also presented a curious juxtaposition between superstition and science. A part of Europe's Early Modern period and the birth of the Baroque cultural movement, the 1600s also encompassed the early years of the Scientific Revolution, when superstition and religion gave way to scientific reasoning. Furthermore, the Enlightenment, which […]
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Latest BHL Quarterly ReportIf you think all we do is digitize books, get ready to be surprised! Besides adding over 700,000 new pages of open access biodiversity literature to our collection in 2013 alone, we've launched a new website, celebrated the birth of another regional node - BHL-Africa, grown our consortium by adding the Library of Congress as our 15th member library, published two new iTunes U collections, received two prestigious awards, and hosted our seventh Annual Institutional
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Water and Biodiversity Water covers 71% of the Earth's surface. 96.5% of Earth's water is found in oceans, 1.7% in groundwater, 1.7% in glaciers and ice caps, and 0.001% in vapor and clouds. Only 2.5% of that water is freshwater, with most of that found in ice and groundwater.Water is essential for all life on Earth. From the smallest microbe to the largest known life form on Earth - the Blue Whale - life cannot exist without water.Today is the International Day for Biological Diversity, and […]
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The Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Hymenoptera Anatomy OntologyKatja C. SeltmannThe realm of ontology concerns the nature of reality, determining what exists, how it fits within a hierarchy, and how various elements are organized according to similarities and differences. Traditionally a philosophical question within metaphysics, today ontology has a firm application within systems biology as well.Anatomy ontologies describe the structural and developmental relationships between the […]
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The Biodiversity Heritage Library is pleased to announce that it is the recipient of the Charles Robert Long Award of Extraordinary Merit from the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries (CBHL).The highest honor bestowed by CBHL, the Charles Robert Long Award for Extraordinary Merit was founded to honor outstanding contribution and meritorious service to CBHL or to the field of botanical and horticultural libraries or literature. Since 1988, only 14 people have received this […]
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