plate from the 1919 publication:
Birds Beneficial to Agriculture
Printed by the British Museum



As a library, one of our main jobs is to make students, faculty and staff aware of the many resources we have availalbe to us. Today we are highlighting an open access resource: 

Biodiversity Heritage Library

This is totally free and is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL is revolutionizing global research by providing free, worldwide access to knowledge about life on Earth.

BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to address this challenge by digitizing the natural history literature held in their collections and making it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”

The BHL portal provides free access to hundreds of thousands of volumes, comprising over 55 million pages, from the 15th-21st centuries. In addition to public domain content, BHL works with rights holders to obtain permission to make in-copyright materials openly available under Creative Commons licenses.

The BHL consortium works with the international taxonomic community, publishers, bioinformaticians, and information technology professionals to develop tools and services to facilitate greater access, interoperability, and reuse of content and data. BHL provides a range of services, data exports, and APIs to allow users to download content, harvest source data files, and reuse materials for research purposes. Through the Global Names Recognition and Discovery (GNRD) service, BHL indexes the taxonomic names throughout the collection, allowing researchers to locate publications about specific taxa [Excerpted from their website].

You can follow the link above and HERE to find this resource.