Screenshot from Smorball, one of BHL's new crowdsourcing games.

BHL has launched two new crowdsourcing games: Beanstalk and Smorball. The games were created as part of BHL's Purposeful Gaming project, which is exploring how digital games can make scanned content more accessible. The games will help improve access to books and journals in the BHL collection by verifying the accuracy of text previously encoded by optical character recognition software. Purposeful Gaming is made possible by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Learn more.  

Altmetric on BHL

You can now easily explore online conversations about books in the BHL collection thanks to the release of Altmetric on the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Altmetric is a tool that tracks online mentions of a library's or publisher's content, including via social media, blogs, and news outlets. Altmetric is tracking online conversations that include links to BHL books and articles. All mentions of an individual book are aggregated together into a single dashboard which is accessible by clicking on the Altmetric badge (a colorful, donut-shaped icon) in the book viewer header on BHL. This feature has been released as part of BHL's IMLS-funded Mining Biodiversity project. Learn more.

Haeckel, Ernst. Kunstformen der Natur (1904). Plate 85.

World Oceans Day, celebrated every June 8, is a United Nations-recognized day of ocean celebration and action. BHL celebrated with a week-long social media event exploring publications that represent important milestones in the progress of marine bioscience research and ocean exploration. In addition to tweets; Facebook posts; Flickr, Pinterest, and BHL collections; and blog posts, BHL also partnered with the Smithsonian's Ocean Portal and the Marine Biological Laboratory / Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (MBLWHOI) Library to produce additional content for the campaign, including an article on the Ocean Portal's website about Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur ("Art Forms in Nature") and a post highlighting MBLWHOI's long history of ocean research. 

Agassiz, Louis. Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles (1833-43). Vol. 2, plate 69c.

Naturalist, educator, and founder of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz was born on 28 May, 1807. Over his lifetime, Agassiz published on diverse subjects, including fossil fish and geology, and was instrumental in establishing the existence of an Ice Age. After moving to the U.S. and becomming a professor at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School in 1847, Agassiz eventually founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard in 1859. The Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology celebrated this remarkable man of science on the anniversary of his birth with a blog post detailing his life and contributions to science. Learn more.