Who flies an invisible plane, boasts equal parts strength and style, and says "SMITHSONIAN" like no other? If you guessed Wonder Woman, then you're one step closer to helping the Libraries win the Smithsonian Summer Showdown!

Help the Smithsonian Libraries defeat our foes by voting for Wonder Woman #1 as the most iconic item in the Smithsonian collections. Each unit of the Smithsonian is currently competing to win Round 1 (and it's getting pretty fierce)! You may have noticed this week our promotion of Wonder Woman on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Unbound blog, and especially on Tumblr with an animated gif, courtesy of data manager Richard Naples.

Please take a moment today and cast your vote to Wonder Woman for the win! Also, be a superhero and share this message with friends, family, and colleagues!

The new Neville-Pribram Mid-Career Educators Award will allow mid-career educators to be in residence and utilize our distinctive collections, focusing on science, history, culture, and arts. The awards are open to middle and high school teachers, college instructors, and museum educators working on curriculum development or publications in print or electronic form. In 2015, recipients will be awarded a short-term residency at the Warren M. Robbins Library at the National Museum of African Art, with an opportunity to conduct research in the arts of Africa and related fields of African culture and history. The Library offers excellent resources for developing curricula relating to Common Core, Core Arts Standards, and Advance Placement curricula. 

The Warren M. Robbins Library at the National Museum of African Art is the leading library in the world for the research and study of African visual arts. It houses more than 45,000 volumes on African art, history and culture. The Library embraces classical and modern African visual arts with strong supporting collections of African history, archaeology, architecture, religion, ethnography, oral tradition, musicology, photography, and cinema. Additional holdings cover African literatures, popular culture, African museums, curriculum materials, and children's books. Read more about the Neville-Pribram award, including eligibility and application information.

The story of the last passenger pigeon and the disappearance of the great auk, Carolina parakeet, and heath hen reveal the fragile connections between species and their environment, and are featured in our new exhibition, Once There Were Billions: Vanished Birds of North America. This month we're highlighting the heath hen, with content from the exhibition and illustrations from the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

During colonial times, heath hens flourished among the heathland barrens of coastal North America from Maine to Virginia. Tasty and easy to kill, they were popular among early settlers, and their numbers quickly declined from overhunting, habitat loss, and disease. In 1791, the New York State legislature introduced a bill calling for the preservation of heath hens and other game, but it couldn't be enforced. After the birds disappeared from the mainland, a heath hen sanctuary was established on Martha's Vineyard in 1908. The sanctuary was home to the entire Heath Hen population--50 birds in all. By 1915, they numbered 2,000. But when a fire destroyed the sanctuary's habitat in 1916, their numbers dwindled. The last one died in 1932. 

Extinctions are often most visible to us when they affect a highly visible species in our communities, especially if there are repercussions for our food sources or income. But extinctions can also have far-reaching impacts that may not be as immediately visible. One way to better understand biodiversity and its significance is to support organizations like the Biodiversity Heritage Library, a global project (headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries) that is changing the way research is done by digitizing and providing open access to biodiversity literature.