Over 250,000 nature images are now freely available in the BHL Flickr!

Since 2011, we’ve been making many of the illustrations from BHL’s collection available via Flickr. Last year, with many of our partners working virtually, we focused on projects to improve our digital collections remotely. This provided a unique opportunity to substantially grow our Flickr collection by over 90,000 new images—a nearly 200% increase in images uploaded compared to 2019.

Flickr also provides an opportunity for the public to help enhance the metadata for these images through crowdsourcing by adding tags for species, artists, and more.

Join us on 25 March 2021 (1-3pm ET) for Wikipedia & Women in Science: Smithsonian Groundbreakers Edit-a-thon, an online Wikipedia editing workshop hosted in conjunction with the Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative and the Smithsonian Institution Archives, part of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives.

During this training, attendees of all experience levels will learn the basics of how to edit Wikipedia by updating articles related to the history of women in science at the Smithsonian Institution. Presenters will share how editors might research the work of these women in the absence of personal papers and institutional records.

We have updated the bibliography pages in BHL to streamline the presentation of information about and metadata export options for content in the Library.

The Ernst Mayr Library and Archives of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University holds a unique and extensive collection of photographs, letters, manuscripts and field notes from ornithologist William Brewster. These materials offer a rich record of ecological change and species occurrence data and provide insight into the contributions of those who worked with Brewster, such as Black photographer Robert Alexander Gilbert. Through a series of articles on the BHL blog, the Ernst Mayr Library explores the impact of digitizing and transcribing Brewster's writings, which make the unpublished observations and primary source data in these archival records available for text analysis, data mining, and digital scholarship in modern scientific and humanitarian research efforts.