Zoology Commons^™

Advancing Natural History Research Using The Collections Of The Owu Brant Museum Of Zoology, Josh Pletcher, Kyle Davis

Student Symposium

Natural history collections are important repositories of biological and geological material. Biological collections provide raw data to interpret the ecology, anatomy, and evolution of living and fossil organisms. OWU’s zoological collections play an important role in undergraduate research and educating future preparators. Two projects are currently in progress: Kyle Davis’ work on size variation in house sparrows and Josh Pletcher’s work digitizing OWU’s collection of Ward’s fossil casts. We travelled to museums in New York and Connecticut to further pursue our research. Kyle Davis’ research focuses on Bergmann’s Rule, which states that as temperature decreases, body size increases, decreasing surface …

Expanding Access To Biodiversity Literature, Patrick Randall

Digital Initiatives Symposium

Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL) is an IMLS-funded grant designed to enhance the collection of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), a digital library providing open access to over 50 million pages of legacy biodiversity literature.

BHL's collection is built on the digitized holdings of its member libraries, typically large research universities, natural history museums, and other well-funded organizations. EABL, however, solicits content outside the BHL consortium; small organizations that often lack the resources for cataloging and digitization nevertheless have valuable and unique literature to contribute. This has created new challenges for BHL workflows, as well as opportunities for novel …