The Encyclopedia of Life and Biodiversity Heritage Library
The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) at Woods Hole, and the Library of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI), are leading partners in several related projects, including:
1. The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) will provide an authoritative web page for each of 1.8 million named species on Earth. Each of over 160,000 currently existing pages includes authoritative information about the organism’s classification, physiology and ecology, as well as genetic sequence data for bioinformatics analysis (view sample pages).
Partners in this project include the Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University, the Smithsonian Institution, Missouri Botanical Garden, American Museum of Natural History (New York), British Natural History Museum (London), New York Botanical Garden, and Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew).
From the 2009 annual report:
“Encyclopedia of Life’s portal includes more than 160,000 authenticated species pages, another 1.4 million base pages and links to 14 million pages of digitized biodiversity literature. In the newest version of the EOL portal, users can contribute photos and videos via the EOL Flickr Group, apply tags to images and provide comments on the content.”
2. The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the digitization component of the Encyclopedia of Life. A consortium of 12 major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions are digitizing images of plant and animal species to provide access to printed biodiversity and taxonomic literature. The screenshots below show how to access works in the history of science through the BHL.
Also note that the image galleries of the OU History of Science Collections include many botanical and natural history depictions, including:
- John Gerard, Herball (1597)
- Leonhart Fuchs, De historia stirpium (1542)
- Francesco Hernandez, Rerum medicarum Novae Hispaniae thesaurus (1651)
- Charles Darwin, Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle (1838-1843):
- vol 1 – Mammals
- vol 2 – Birds
- vol 3 – Reptiles & Fish
