Biodiversity Heritage Library

It’s National Library Week 2020! This year’s theme is “Find your place at the library.” While the Smithsonian Libraries has closed its 21 physical branches during the COVID-19 outbreak, our work continues. We invite you to find a place with us online through our virtual resources, continued services, and digital content. We are here to help you explore and discover from the comfort of your home–and we look forward to welcoming you back in person as soon as we can.

Although our 21 physical branches remain closed during the COVID-19 outbreak, we’re still excited to celebrate National Library Week with our users near and far. While staff and researchers are certainly missing physical book collections, thousands of titles are available online thanks to the work of our Digital Library and Digitization Department.

Need a fun mental break? We’ve created six digital jigsaw puzzles through Jigsaw Explorer that feature a few favorite images from our collection. Play them right here on our blog or use the links to expand an individual puzzle. Each puzzle is set to contain about 100 pieces, but they are customizable for any skill set. Hit the question mark icon on a puzzle for more information. We’ve tested these with staff (and kid volunteers!) and hope you enjoy them as much as we did!

As the world faces the global challenge of COVID-19, the Smithsonian Libraries is working to provide research services and resources to our users around the world.

Whether you’re headed back to school, back to work, or back to your home office or dining room table this fall, we’ve compiled a few fun treats and created this Digital Book Bag for you! Piece together digital jigsaw puzzles, download free coloring pages, or browse a few favorite books from our Di

You asked and we delivered. A new set of digital jigsaw puzzles is finally here! We’re so glad you enjoyed our last round of puzzles and hope you find these equally entertaining.

Another season, another set of digital jigsaw puzzles! Ahead of National Puzzle Day (January 29th), we’ve put together one more round of images for you to piece together. They include a few snowy scenes as well as some warmer images to brighten your winter months.

The pineapple, indigenous to South America and domesticated and harvested there for centuries, was a late comer to Europe. The fruit followed in its cultivation behind the tomato, corn, potato, and other New World imports. Delicious but challenging and expensive to nurture in chilly climes and irresistible to artists and travelers for its curious structure, the pineapple came to represent many things. For Europeans, it was first a symbol of exoticism, power, and wealth, but it was also an emblem of colonialism, weighted with connections to plantation slavery.

Calling all coloring enthusiasts! #ColorOurCollections is back for 2021 and we have a brand new coloring packet just for you. We’ve teamed up with our colleagues at Smithsonian Institution Archives to bring you ten coloring pages to help break your winter boredom. Download them now!

A garden is a place to rest, relax, rejuvenate. It also provides an opportunity to learn about nature. Staff at Smithsonian Libraries and Archives are also learning and developing new skills. Some of these new skills are related to digitization and accessibility of biodiversity literature.

This week (April 4-10, 2021) is  National Library Week  and Tuesday is set aside to celebrate National Library Workers Day. It’s a wonderful opportunity to highlight the important contributions made by all library staff.  In honor of National Library Workers Day, we caught up with a few staff members to hear what they’ve been working on over the past year.

To celebrate National Library Week and the start of spring, we’ve put together another round of digital jigsaw puzzles! We hope these cheerful florals brighten your screens and bring you a few moments of peace, minus the pollen.

This post was originally featured on the Biodiversity Heritage Library blog. 

Na au iki a me na au nui o ka ʻike: The little and the large currents of knowledge.

This post was written by Katerina Ozment, part of the Smithsonian Libraries’ 50

 A chill rain drizzled over guests arriving at Bamie Roosevelt’s midtown brownstone near the corner of Madison Avenue and East 62nd Street in December 1887. There weren’t many of them, but all had two things in common: they were New York’s most influential and rich social elite, and they all loved hunting big game. All were hand-picked by the h

This blog post was written by Taylor Smith, the 2019 Kathryn Turner Diversity and Technology Intern in the Smithsonian Libraries’ Web Services Department. At the time of her internship, Taylor was an undergraduate Computer Science student at Bowie State University.

This post originally appeared on the Smithsonian Institution Archives’ blog. Nell MacCarty’s internship was part of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives’ 50th Anniversary Internship program, with funding provided by the Secretary of the Smithsonian and the Smithsonian National Board.

This post was written by Lezlie Hernandez, a Summer 2021 intern at the Smithsonian Institution Archives, sponsored by the American Women’s History Initiative. Her project focused on researching the history of Smithsonian women in science. 

Ready to fall into another round of digital jigsaw puzzles? We’ve put together, or rather, taken apart five new puzzles based on images in our collections.

Argentine grass expert Dr. Cleofé E. Calderón (1929-2007) collected species, published descriptions of rare and unusual plants, and led workshops that helped shape the field of bamboo taxonomy. Affiliated with the Smithsonian for much of her agrostology career, Dr. Calderón’s legacy can be traced in collections across the Institution, including publications, field books, and photos in Smithsonian Libraries and Archives.

To celebrate National Library Week and a new spring season, we’ve put together another round of digital jigsaw puzzles. This time we’re featuring a variety of soothing natural history-related scenes.

Between 1849 and 1851, Johan George Heck published his encyclopedia Bilder-Atlas zum Conversations-Lexicon and the work continues to offer valuable insight into life in the 19th-century.

During my time in the Kathryn Turner Diversity and Technology Internship, I worked with my mentor to create a program/software that would take completed projects from the Smithsonian Transcription Center and clean up the data even further. However, I first had to begin with understanding what I was ‘cleaning up’.

Updated March 12, 2020: These events have been canceled or postponed for a later date. As a public health precaution, the Smithsonian is postponing or canceling all public events through May 3. See si.edu/events for details. Museums and the National Zoo remain open at this time. We are monitoring the guidance of the CDC and local public health officials.