Come celebrate in the Ernst Mayr Library tomorrow, April 27, 2012. April 28 is “Save the Frogs” day We will have goodies starting about 2 pm and there will be original frog illustrations and lovely rare books on view in the Library’s Special Collections area as well as items from the circulating collections.
Leopard frog from Holbrook's North American Herpetology, 1836-1840
The Ernst Mayr Library is a founding member of the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The BHL is a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries that cooperate to digitize and make accessible the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections and to make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global “biodiversity commons.” BHL also serves as the foundational literature component of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL).
In 2005 at the Natural History Museum in London, a group of biologists, librarians, and computer scientists met and demonstrated that the lack of access to the published literature of biodiversity was one of the principal obstacles to efficient and productive research. It was shocking to the librarians that libraries were viewed as barriers to access! By 2007, the directors of the libraries of the American Museum of Natural History, Harvard University Botany Libraries, Harvard University Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Missouri Botanical Garden, Natural History Museum in London, New York Botanical Garden, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Marine Biological Laboratory/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Library and the Smithsonian Institution Libraries agreed to a Memorandum of Agreement that established the BHL. In the years since, other great libraries have joined– from the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences (2009), California Academy of Sciences (2009), Mann Library of Cornell University (2011), the United States Geological Survey (2011).
The Institutional Council annual meeting 2012 at the MCZ.
Just a quick thank you for an outstanding service. It’s a godsend.
With the advent of the BHL Flickr pages and ITunes U presence, the visibility of this resource has expanded. BHL data is also the first data to populate the Digital Public Library of America, as a sort of “science reading room”!
For some detailed history, check out: Rinaldo and Warnement, Rinaldo and Norton and Gwinn and Rinaldo. Read the BHL blog to see what’s new. Meanwhile we continue to add content to the BHL, including current content when rightsholders agree.
Welcome to the Ernst Mayr Library blog! In 1861 Louis Agassiz purchased books from the collection of Belgian paleontologist Laurent Guillaume de Koninick and along with Agassiz’s personal collection, the MCZ Library was born. In October 1995, the library was renamed in honor of Ernst Mayr, evolutionary biologist and former director of the MCZ. Ernst Mayr was 91 when the library was renamed, and still actively publishing and participating in lively arguments with his colleagues until shortly before his death at 100 on February 3, 2005.
For a fuller library history, see the article by Robert Young, Special Collections Librarian Happy 150th Birthday to the MCZ Library!
Welcome to the Ernst Mayr Library blog! In 1861 Louis Agassiz purchased books from the collection of Belgian paleontologist Laurent Guillaume de Koninick and along with Agassiz’s personal collection, the MCZ Library was born. In October 1995, the library was renamed in honor of Ernst Mayr, evolutionary biologist and former director of the MCZ. Ernst Mayr was 91 when the library was renamed, and still actively publishing and participating in lively arguments with his colleagues until shortly before his death at 100 on February 3, 2005.
For a fuller library history, see the article by Robert Young, Special Collections Librarian Happy 150th Birthday to the MCZ Library!