The new belle of the ball in NUS Libraries is BLSEA, the Biodiversity Library of Southeast Asia! Containing rare and unique content on the flora and fauna of Southeast Asia, BLSEA (pronounced “bell-sea”) is a labour of love between NUS Libraries and Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum (LKCNHM), Singapore. Both LKCNHM and NUS Libraries have contributed titles to the database, and NUS Libraries delivers BLSEA by scanning, uploading and hosting the content. (To NUS Libraries: Happy Mother’s Day! From BLSEA)

Shellfish drawings from the Bulletin of the Raffles Museum, No. 26

For this initial launch of BLSEA, at least 64 volumes have been uploaded, which includes reports, catalogues of flora and fauna, correspondences, hand-drawn plates of Southeast Asian birds, mammals, reptiles, plants, fishes and other organisms, climatic data and other types of information. Some titles date back to the 1860s and cover areas outside of Southeast Asia.

Artichoke drawings from the Natural History of Plants, Vol. VIII

Look out for new content to be uploaded in the future, as well as new functions such as free-text searching (which will allow you to search within the scanned documents), taxonomic name searching and tagging through social media.