Biodiversity Heritage Library

I stumbled across a fantastic website this morning that I wanted to share my discovery with everyone: The Biodiversity Heritage Library. It is a collaborate effort from ten of the most significant institutions in the country (listed below), as they all work on digitizing classic (often old, now obscure, limited availability, or any combination of the three) science texts.

This is an awesome database for classic works in biology, you can get search results that take you to a specific page within a book or article that has the information you need, similar to Google Books. Also, you can download many of the items as pdfs, I became the gleeful owner of The bats of Iran: systematics, distribution, ecology, by Anthony F. DeBlase, with a simple click of a button!

I highly recommend this to anyone interested in biology. Many of the texts are dated, but it is important to have records of what scientists were thinking about and working with in the past. I think gives us a much better appreciation for not only what we know today and how we got this far.


List of participating institutions:

• American Museum of Natural History (New York, NY)
• The Field Museum (Chicago, IL)
• Harvard University Botany Libraries (Cambridge, MA)
• Harvard University, Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (Cambridge, MA)
• Marine Biological Laboratory / Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Woods Hole, MA)
• Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis, MO)
• Natural History Museum (London, UK)
• The New York Botanical Garden (New York, NY)
• Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (Richmond, UK)
• Smithsonian Institution Libraries (Washington, DC)

(Image credit)