Happy Birthday BHL!

BHL at launch in May, 2007

Like proud parents, we're excited to announce that today BHL turns 5 years old! In 2007, the Biodiversity Heritage Library portal was launched with 306 titles, 3,236 volumes, and 1,271,664 pages of taxonomic literature, presented via a simple portal bathed in earthy tones. What began as a consortium of just 10 natural history and botanical libraries has today grown into a global project, with 14 US/UK consortium members as well as BHL nodes on every continent in the world except Antarctica.

Today, BHL includes:

• Over 55,000 titles, 105,000 volumes, and 38.6 million pages
• New and improved portal with updated colors, enhanced user-interface, and more Google-like, user-friendly searching
• New logo
• The ability to create your own PDF and download high-resolution images of BHL content
• The ability to generate bibliographies for specific species
• 13,048,166 BHL pages linking to EOL species pages, as well as 1,284,930 EOL species pages linking to BHL
• An advanced feedback system allowing staff to collect and promptly respond to user-submitted comments about content in BHL
• Scanning Request process to allow users to nominate material to be scanned for BHL
• Improved communication with users, including an active presence on our blog, Twitter, and Facebook
• Our spectacular Flickr account, featuring over 30,000 amazing natural history illustrations and projects in place to improve access to BHL images through the BHL portal
• Integration of our social media outreach into our portal, including the ability to tweet or post to Facebook directly within BHL
• Specialized collections of content within BHL, allowing users to explore our materials in a curated manner, including our extremely popular Charles Darwin's Library collection
• The ability to add BHL titles directly to a Mendeley account
• The Biodiversity Heritage Library on iTunes U, allowing users to access select BHL content within iTunes and download to their iPod Touch, iPad, or iPhone
• The BHL public wiki - a one-stop shop for information about our project, FAQs, copyright policies, tutorials, and more
• New BHL Newsletter
• New BHL Quarterly Reports to keep users informed about project progress
• Active staff that regularly present about BHL at conferences and publish papers about our project
• BHL nodes in Australia, Europe, China, Egypt, and Brazil, with discussions underway to create a BHL for Sub-Saharan Africa
• Recognition as one of the top twelve free reference tools of 2011 by Library Journal

These are just a few of the improvements we've made to BHL since it was born in 2007. Take a look at what BHL used to look like through the Internet Archive's Way Back Machine. We're proud of the progress we've made and look forward to the next five years. We're expecting big things!