National Museum of Natural History Unearthed

The Encyclopedia of Life: Global access to knowledge about life on Earth

Where do you go to find information about species? Perhaps you head to the library to check out some books, but more than likely, you go online. The world has transformed the way it finds and consumes scientific information.  Just a few years ago, access to knowledge about the world’s 1.9 million species of plants, animals and microorgansisms on one free, trusted website might have seemed impossible, but now the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL; eol.org) is quickly making that dream a reality.  

How can one organization possibly catalog life on Earth? By harnessing the collective energy of scientists, students, and people like you! EOL relies on a consortium of over 200 content partners, including the Smithsonian Institution, and more than 50,000 users around the world to compile information on every species.   Since its beginnings in 2007, EOL has expanded from 30,000 to more than one million pages. 

Technology plays a very important role in getting all the species information to the right place in EOL.  Every day, EOL computers gather up information about living creatures that is stored in databases all over the world.   These databases belong to our EOL Content Partners, without whom EOL could not exist. These same EOL computers then organize this information by the names of those living creatures. For example, even though EOL gets information about wolves from many sources, it is all organized together in one place to make it easy for you to find (search for “wolf” and see for yourself).

As new content flows into EOL, it is reviewed by experts called “curators” who help maintain EOL’s high-quality information. We also make all of our information freely available for re-use under a Creative Commons license. EOL is a collaborative initiative, and we invite people like you to come to the EOL website to learn about living nature, leave comments, create EOL Collections, participate in EOL Communities, or share your expertise by writing articles, reviewing content, or by becoming an EOL Content Partners.

As EOL grows, we are expanding to become a global community of collaborators serving the general public, enthusiastic amateurs, educators, students and professional scientists from around the world.  But we can’t do it alone and we need you to join in this international effort to catalogue biodiversity. We have millions of visitors each year - are you one of them?

Let’s get started! Here are some easy and fun ways to explore EOL and help us build our collective understanding of life on Earth -

- Visit our website at EOL.org and learn about a new species

- Register with EOL (it’s free and easy) to access the full spectrum of tools and resources

- Build an EOL Collection of your favorite plants or animals to share with friends and family

- Listen to a podcast from our free series, One Species at a Time

- Build a field guide for an upcoming hike or vacation

- Follow us on Twitter for regular fun facts, quizzes and announcements

- Become a fan on Facebook to see gorgeous images, news articles and updates

- Add images to our Flickr group, or enter one of our regular photo contests (recent themes include Stinky and Seed Dispersal)

- Read our blog to keep up with our latest developments

- Tell your friends, families and teachers about EOL.org and help us spread the word!

 

By Caroline Kryder, EOL Collaborator, and Breen Byrnes, EOL Public Information Officer

 

Image captions and credits (top to bottom): Party Time courtesy EOL Flickr contributor Charles Lam; Barbary Macaque (Macaca sylvanus) courtesy EOL Flickr contributor RedCoat; Red Bonnet (Mycena viscidocruenta) courtesy EOL Flickr contributor Arthur Chapman.

Teens at the Intersection of Design and Science

The National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) recently served up an interesting challenge for local students—design mobile education “carts” for our new state-of-the-art Education Center, currently under construction here at NMNH.

The students, part of the National Building Museum’s Design Apprenticeship Program (DAP), are involved in a seven-week course in which students learn about design by designing and planning a product and then building it. For the last 11 years, the program has been giving middle and high school teens a chance to learn about designing, building, working as a team, and working for a client. 

To be successful in their building design, the students learned about what kind of work is conducted at the National Museum of Natural History. DAP students met with scientists, educators, volunteers, and exhibits staff from the museum to learn about how and what NMNH scientists study, how science information is conveyed, and how the museum uses carts to give visitors an up-close view of objects and conduct demonstrations.

Supporting the program’s core values of teamwork, research, and peer communication, the DAP students met with NMNH’s Youth Advisory Board (YAB). YAB, a group of local teens working with NMNH to develop new ways to communicate science to their peers, provided the DAP students a perspective from other teens on what happens at NMNH and gave them an opportunity to exchange ideas.

Exposing the students to both museums has played a real role in helping students understand the intersection between design and science. “Design and science are interconnected. Design is all about how people perceive something, to the point that it really is a science…” said Vangie Hakes, a DAP teen.

“And in science, design is really apparent. Everything in the universe, whether it's natural or man-made, is designed in a certain way, to serve a certain purpose. The way a thing works is based on its design.”

Since NMNH is in the midst of building its new education center, the design project has been very timely. The new education center will be a 10,000-square-foot space designed for students, families, teachers, and life-long learners to get up-close to the science behind the science at the National Museum of Natural History.  Visitors will be able to handle and learn about 20,000 collection objects, attend lectures and events in a new theatre, and participate in activities in the classroom.

The new space will house activities focused on thousands of collection objects, education programs, and public programs that are designed to be happening simultaneously. The complexity of the Education Center space and program design is an important project component for the students to better understand how their education cart design will fit into the bigger picture.

Stepping up to the design challenge, DAP students understood that integration of the Education Center design was critical in creating a successful product. “This program teaches us how to listen to other ideas, patience, and compromise.  At DAP I learned more cooperation skills and mixing skills meaning taking my ideas and the ideas of others, mixing them together to make one big design,” observed DAP student Taylor Hicks.

The collaborative effort between the two museums and their youth programs not only taught the students about design and building, but it also helped the students understand the value of communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity.

“Working with the actual client and meeting their needs really helps see what would happen in the real world because you have certain specifications you need to meet and if you don’t, they won’t be satisfied,” says DAP student Sumaiyah Liggans.

The collaboration between the National Building Museum and the National Museum of Natural History has been a successful pilot project.  The DAP students are continuing to learn about design and building, while serving real community needs. Students from each of the Museum’s teen programs are also learning how transferrable their new skills are between the building and science disciplines.

On Saturday, April 28, 2012, from 1-3 pm, the National Building Museum will host a reception where the teens will present their prototypes. The event is free and open to the public, with refreshments after the presentations are complete. Come out to the National Building Museum to help these students celebrate their accomplishments. 

Maggy Benson, Partnerships Manager, Office of Education & Outreach

 

Editor’s Note: DAP is open to 12-18 year old students in the Washington, DC metro region.  There are two, seven-week semesters of the program per year, held in the fall and spring. Registration information for the DAP program is available on the National Building Museum’s website.

 

Images: Design Apprenticeship Program students work as a team to design and build mobile education “carts” for the National Museum of Natural History’s new Education Center. The students worked closely with National Museum of Natural History staff to understand how the mobile education “carts” would be used, to better inform their design and prototype, seen here being built. All images courtesy of the National Building Museum.

2011 Nature's Best Photography Windland Smith Rice International Awards Exhibit

The 2011 Nature's Best Photography Windland Smith Rice International Awards Exhibit opened at the Natural History Museum on March 30, 2012. We all know that photography is a strikingly compelling means of experiencing nature's majesty. This concept is the driving force behind the Nature's Best Photography competition, which operates under the mission to "celebrate the beauty and diversity of nature through the art of photography." The Museums's exhibit features the winners in each award category, as well as a collection of some of the highly honored photographs submitted to the competition this year.

Last month, we featured a post highlighting the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), a consortium digital library project (of which the Smithsonian is a founding member) providing free access to millions of pages of biodiversity literature. The online library features not only texts but also stunning illustrations of natural history from the past 500 years. Not surprisingly, the species featured in the award-winning photographs from the Nature's Best Exhibit can also be found in the historic books held in the BHL collection. To celebrate the exhibit, we're highlighting some of the featured photographs and sharing more about the species captured in each snapshot through illustrations and scientific descriptions found in the Biodiversity Heritage Library. You can also learn more about the species starring in the exhibit by visiting the Encyclopedia of Life.

Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus)

 

Winner: Wildlife. Polar Bear Cub, Barents Sea, Norway. Florian Schulz, NBP Awards 2011.

Constantine John Phipps, 2nd Baron Mulgrave, was the first to describe the polar bear, which he encountered during his 1773 expedition to the North Pole. He published the account in the 1774 publication A Voyage Towards the North Pole. Just four years later,  the first published illustration of the bear was released in Die Säugthiere in Abbildungen nach der Natur (below).

 

See the first description of the Polar Bear in BHL.
See the first published illustration of the Polar Bear in BHL.

Lion (Panthera leo)

 

Highly Honored: African Wildlife. African Lions, Maasai Mara National Reserve, Kenya. Federico Veronesi, NBP Awards 2011.

The lion was first described by Carl Linnaeus, a famous Swedish botanist and zoologist who developed the schema of identifying organisms by genus and species names ñ a system known as binomial nomenclature. He is therefore referred to as the Father of Modern Taxonomy. The tenth edition of his revolutionary work, Systema Naturae, represents the birth of zoological nomenclature (using binomial nomenclature for animals). The Lion was scientifically described for the first time in this work.

In 1909, Frank Finn's work Wild Beasts of the World was published, containing 100 reproduced illustrations of nature drawings by Louis Sargent, Cuthbert E. Swan, and Winifred Austin. One of the drawings contained within the first volume was "Lion and Lioness," by Louis Sargent (above).

See the first description of the lion in BHL.
See Louis Sargent's drawing in BHL.

Stag Beetle (Lucanus cervus)

Highly Honored: Small World. Stag Beetles, , Irún, Spain.  Jose Grandío, NBP Awards 2011.

The Stag Beetle was also first described by Carl Linnaeus in his tenth edition of Systema Naturae. The beetle's common name comes from the resemblance of the speciesí large mandibles to a deer's antlers. Furthermore, male deer use their antlers when battling over territory and mates. The Stag Beetle uses its mandibles for the same purposes.

In 1792, Edward Donovan, an Anglo-Irish writer, illustrator and amateur zoologist, published the first volume of his sixteen volume work entitled The Natural History of British Insects. The series, published over a period of twenty-one years, contained 576 plates, 568 of which were colored. His depiction of the Stag Beetle, wings extended in flight, is particularly memorable (above).

See the first description of the Stag Beetle in BHL.
See Donovan's illustration of the Stag Beetle in BHL.

We hope you get the opportunity to visit the Nature's Best Photography Exhibit at the Natural History Museum, running March 30, 2012-January 6, 2013. You can find out more about the animals in the photographs by searching on the species name in the Biodiversity Heritage Library and visiting the Encyclopedia of Life Collection. See more illustrations of these species from BHL in our Flickr collection.

 

Grace Costantino, Biodiversity Heritage Library Program Manager

 

Photo Credits:

• Nature's Best Polar Bear: Winner: Wildlife. Polar Bear Cub, Barents Sea, Norway. Florian Schulz, NBP Awards 2011..
• BHL Polar Bear: Schreber, Johann Christian Daniel. (1774-1846). Die Säugthiere in Abbildungen nach der Natur. (pl. 141).
• Nature's Best Lion: Highly Honored: African Wildlife. African Lions, Maasai Mara National Reserve, Kenya. Federico Veronesi, NBP Awards 2011.
• BHL Lion: Finn, Frank. (1909). The Wild Beasts of the World. (vol. 1, "Lion and Lioness").
• Nature's Best Stag Beetle: Highly Honored: Small World. Stag Beetles, Irún, Spain.  Jose Grandío, NBP Awards 2011.
• BHL Stag Beetle: Donovan, Edward. (1792). The Natural History of British Insects. (vol. 1, pl. 13).

 

 

The Field Book Project

Field books are the original records of scientific research and discovery.  Typical field books might include scientific data on species, habitats, and environments.  They can also take the form of journals and diaries which provide a more personal perspective on field work including accounts of travels, people encountered, and daily events.  Some of my personal favorites are ones that talk about the food that was eaten during these travels, some of which even go into detail notes on the ingredients or preparation of local cuisines.  

At the Smithsonian, there are more than 6,000 field books covering two centuries of biodiversity field work.  Representing the work of historic expeditions, well-known scientists and key moments in the history of biological research, many of these are inextricably linked to field books in other collections across the country.  Take the United States Exploring Expedition or Wilkes Expedition as it’s commonly called. With field books from that single expedition now housed at more than a dozen institutions across the country and many not yet available online, finding them all can be a laborious task indeed. 

To help improve access to these types of materials, the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) and the Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA) came together to form the Field Book Project.  Working together with six other leading natural history organizations, the Field Book Project is developing a Field Book Registry which will make it possible to search and locate field book content through one online location.

Over the 18 months that the project has been underway, the Field Book Project has cataloged more than 4,000 of the Smithsonian field books and highlighted many of them on our blog.  You can read stories about collecting adventures, world travels, methods used to create field books and some of the conservation treatments we use to ensure that these field books are preserved for future generations.  Photographs from these collections are also available on Flickr Commons and give a glimpse into field work conducted over the last century.

Start exploring these images and stories, and subscribe to our website newsfeed and blog to see what we find next.

 Carolyn Sheffield, Project Manager, Field Book Project

Image Captions:
SIA 2012-1880, Field notes of Martin H. Moynihan, Barro Colorado, Panama, 1958.

SIA2012-0664, Starfish specimen collected off the coast of Palmer Peninsula, Antarctica, c. 1962. 

SIA2011-0403. Portion of field book page with photograph by Edward Chapin, in Guasca, Colombia, 1942.  

The Biodiversity Heritage Library: Free Access to Biodiversity Literature

An Entomologist writing a book on skipper butterflies needs to verify several citations and species names. The information he needs to do so is held within a natural history library not accessible to him. A team of malacologists is attempting to catalog the entire family of Pyramidellidae, but after fifty years has still barely scratched the surface as they are unable to identify and obtain the necessary literature. A botanist in an isolated African village has no access to the literature needed to complete his research project on local flora. Just ten years ago, without access to the necessary literature, the individuals in each of these scenarios would have been unable to complete their work. Today, the Biodiversity Heritage Library has changed that reality. 

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a consortium of 14 natural history and botanical libraries (including the Smithsonian Institution) that collaborate to digitize past and present biodiversity literature, all of which is made freely available to the public. On BHL, you can find over 37.8 million pages of digitized literature (representing over 53,000 titles and 102,000 volumes), going back as far as 1484 and continuing to present day. Not only can you browse millions of pages online, but you can download PDFs and high resolution images of that material. You can also search for literature about a specific species and navigate back to the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) for more information on the organism.

You can learn more about BHL, discover fun biodiversity facts, participate in daily quizzes, and explore thousands of free biodiversity images through BHL's social media outlets, including our Blog, Twitter and Facebook. Be sure to check out BHL's Flickr account, which includes more than 23,000 natural history and botanical illustrations from the past 400 years, many of which are extremely rare and incredibly valuable. This growing collection of images from BHL books (several of which are featured in this post) is freely available for download and reuse. Finally, you can download select BHL content directly to your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch though the Biodiversity Heritage Library on iTunes U. Again, all content is completely free.

Today, earth's biodiversity faces many challenges, and it is vital that the critical knowledge held within legacy literature be made available to scientists, researchers, conservationists, and the public at large so that we can make intelligent decisions to save global biodiversity for generations to come. Projects like BHL, which provide free global access to digitized versions of this literature, repatriate information about the earth's species to all parts of the world, helping everyone obtain the information needed to protect and preserve life on Earth.

Start exploring today at www.biodiversitylibrary.org. 


Grace Costantino, Program Manager, Biodiversity Heritage Library


Image Captions and Credits (top to bottom): New illustration of the sexual system of Carolus von Linnaeus :and the temple of Flora, or garden of nature (1807), Nymphaea nelumbo, Sacred Egyptian Bean. http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/307094; Bilder-Atlas zur wissenschaftlich-popul‰ren Naturgeschichte der Wirbelthiere (1867), Fig. 9. http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/4024179; Kunstformen der Natur (1904), Taf. 85. http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/33543656.