On 1 January 2026, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) will take flight, becoming fully independent after nearly two decades hosted by the Smithsonian Institution.

This transition marks an historic milestone for BHL and for the global biodiversity and open-science communities we serve. It also brings an urgent challenge: ensuring that the infrastructure, staffing, and partnerships that keep over 500 years of biodiversity knowledge open to the world remain secure and sustainable.

Our Community Has Lifted Us. Now We Must Keep Flying…

When the Smithsonian announced in early 2025 that it would step back from hosting and administering BHL, the global consortium rallied. Through our Call for Support, we received commitments from institutions and outpourings of love from our global network – a testament to the strength of the BHL community and the value placed on free, global access to biodiversity literature.

Those pledges give us the stability we need to complete our transition and begin building a long-term foundation for the future. Yet they will only sustain us through 2026 – perhaps into 2027.

Puffin, Fratercula arctica (Pl. 51), illustrated by Henry Constantine Richter, from The Birds of Great Britain by John Gould, 1873.

To truly soar beyond this transition, we must secure the technical infrastructure, hosting, and staffing that will carry BHL forward for decades to come.

Why We Need Your Help

The #GiveBHLWings campaign, launched for Giving Tuesday 2025, invites everyone who values open knowledge to be part of this transformation. 

Your donation directly supports:

• The servers and systems that deliver millions of digitized pages every day;
• The staff and volunteers who manage metadata, partnerships, and outreach;
• The modernization of infrastructure to make biodiversity literature discoverable, connected, and citable within the global research ecosystem.

Common Flying Fish (Pl. 8), from The natural history of fishes, particularly their structure and economical uses, by John Stevenson Bushnan, 1840.

As we count down to BHL’s independence on 1 January 2026, we invite you to join us. 

Every contribution – large or small – will help ensure that researchers, educators, students, and nature enthusiasts around the world continue to have free access to the biodiversity knowledge that underpins conservation and science.

Help BHL Take Flight

Your support will carry the Biodiversity Heritage Library into its new future: independent, resilient, global, and ready to soar.

🌿 Donate today: help #GiveBHLWings

📢 Spread the word: share the #GiveBHLWings campaign far and wide

💚 Share the love: use #ILoveBHL on social media

💡 Share your ideas: Respond to our Call for Support

📚 Stay up to date: follow #BHLTransition news on the BHL Blog

Squirrel Flying-phalander (Pl. XV), from A hand-book to the marsupialia and monotremata, by Richard Lydekker, 1894.

This month, members of the biodiversity community from across the globe gathered in Bogotá, Colombia, for two major meetings: the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) Governing Board Meeting (19–20 October) and Living Data 2025 (21–24 October).

For the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), these back-to-back events were a timely opportunity to share progress on the BHL Transition and to connect directly with the global community that relies on BHL every day.

Why Colombia?

Colombia was a fitting and inspiring location for these global biodiversity meetings. As one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, Colombia embodies the richness of life that BHL’s collections document. Globally, Colombia has the highest number of species of both orchids and birds, and the second highest number of butterflies, frogs, and freshwater fish. 

(L-R): Golden-tailed Hummingbird, from Humming-birds (1874); orchid Embreea rodigasiana from Curtis’s Botanical Magazine (1900); and the citron-throated toucan Ramphastos citreolaemus, from A flying trip to the tropics (1895).

Hosting these meetings in Colombia also enabled greater participation from the Global South, helping to amplify the voices of regions that hold so much of the world’s biodiversity, but are often underrepresented in global databases and research networks. Both the GBIF and Living Data meetings reflected this commitment to inclusivity and accessibility – values that resonate deeply with BHL’s mission.

Living Data 2025

More than 1,000 participants, including 718 in-person attendees, took part in the Living Data 2025 conference, a joint conference convened by TDWG (Biodiversity Information Standards), GEO BON (Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network), GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility), and OBIS (Ocean Biodiversity Information System).

Under the themes of building standards for data sharing and interoperability, integrating and providing access to diverse information sources, and monitoring progress toward conserving and restoring the planet’s biodiversity, Living Data brought together biodiversity data specialists, scientists, researchers, and practitioners from around the world to explore the standards and collaborations that underpin open biodiversity science.

BHL was represented at Living Data 2025 by:

• Kelli Trei, BHL Transition Director
• Nicole Kearney, BHL Communications Director
• Mike Lichtenberg, BHL Software Engineer
• Richard Wragg, Vice-Chair, BHL Executive Committee

Together, the team ensured that BHL had a strong and visible presence throughout the conference, through formal sessions, the exhibition area, and countless side conversations.

Sharing the BHL Transition

Nicole Kearney presented A New Future for the Biodiversity Heritage Library: from institutional reliance to global resilience as part of the session “Global Infrastructure: Current state, sustainability, and paths forward through data partnerships.”

The talk shared updates on BHL’s transition away from the Smithsonian Institution and toward a more distributed, sustainable, and community-governed future, emphasizing the need for shared responsibility in long-term hosting, governance, and funding.

The timing of the talk could not have been better: just four days after the launch of BHL’s public fundraising campaign and in the first session of the conference. This meant participants heard about the transition early, creating immediate awareness and enthusiasm that carried through the rest of the event. 

To support ongoing conversations, the BHL consortium also hosted a booth in the Living Data exhibition hall. BHL staff were on hand throughout to answer questions and provide information. The booth was a visible hub of activity, welcoming a steady stream of visitors, all eager to express support and learn more about BHL and the transition. 

BHL staff at the BHL booth, Bogotá, October 2025, Photo: Nicole Kearney

QR codes linking directly to the BHL fundraising page were shared during Nicole’s talk and displayed at the booth, encouraging attendees to contribute and help amplify the news of the transition. The message spread quickly throughout the conference: BHL is critical infrastructure and a collective responsibility. 

BHL representation across the Living Data program

As the foundation of our understanding of biodiversity, BHL content – and the importance of open access to it – featured heavily across the Living Data 2025 program. Many presenters shared projects that relied on BHL, including:

• Ben Hartley (né Scott) (Natural History Museum, London): Mining Botanical Literature with Machine Learning
• Roderic Page (University of Glasgow): The roles of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, Wikidata, and Internet Archive in making taxonomic literature discoverable, accessible, and citable
• Nicky Nicholson (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew): Developing an open and participatory literature data extraction workflow using Zotero and Large Language Models
• Michael Elliott (University of Florida): AI-assisted exploration, curation, and extension of biodiversity data using iChatBio
• Donat Agosti (Plazi, Switzerland): The Disentis Roadmap: A decadal roadmap for liberating global biodiversity knowledge from scientific literature

Measurable Benefits of BHL DOIs, from Roderic Page’s presentation The roles of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, Wikidata, and Internet Archive in making taxonomic literature discoverable, accessible, and citable. Photo: Nicole Kearney

Many presentations also included appreciation and messages of support for BHL. In her talk Keeping the integrity of platforms with a worldwide scope in the current complex geopolitical landscape, Patricia Mergen (Meise Botanic Garden, Belgium) announced that Meise is redirecting funds from cancelled non-Open Access journal subscriptions to support BHL, encouraging other institutions to do the same.

BHL and Wikimedia at Living Data

The session featuring the greatest BHL representation was Wikimedia and Biodiversity Data: A Mutualistic Relationship in the Open Knowledge Ecosystem. 

This session explored how Wikimedia projects (Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikispecies) intersect with biodiversity infrastructures like GBIF, iNaturalist, and BHL to advance data mobilization, standardization, and open access. It highlighted the growing role of Wikidata as a hub for persistent identifiers, linking the literature in BHL with specimens, authors, collectors, illustrators and expeditions, and expanding the connected biodiversity knowledge graph.

Presentations included:

• Siobhan Leachman (Wikimedia Aotearoa, New Zealand): Integrating research expedition data from the Biodiversity Heritage Library into the Wikiverse
• Sabine von Mering (Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Germany): Towards a Museum Knowledge Graph: Measuring the Impact of Linked Open Collection Data for the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin 
• Mike Lichtenberg (Biodiversity Heritage Library, United States): Linking Biodiversity Literature and Data: Persistent Identifier Exchange Between BHL and Wikidata
• Roderic Page (University of Glasgow, United Kingdom): Using links from wikis to help discover content in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL)
• Giovanna Fontenelle (Wikimedia Foundation, Brazil): The impact of the BHL-Wiki Working Group in making biodiversity heritage knowledge accessible to all

The speakers in the Wikimedia and Biodiversity Data session. Photo: Nicole Kearney

GBIF Governing Board Meeting

Immediately preceding Living Data 2025, Nicole Kearney represented BHL as Head of Delegation at the 32nd GBIF Governing Board Meeting (GB32), also held in Bogotá.

Hosted by SiB Colombia and the Humboldt Institute, GB32 brought together delegates from around the world to discuss global biodiversity information sharing and the future of open data infrastructure.

Nicole delivered a presentation on the BHL Transition, reinforcing BHL’s position as an integral component of the biodiversity data ecosystem and exploring opportunities for continued collaboration between BHL, GBIF, and partner networks.

The alignment of these two events in Bogotá – GBIF’s global governance meeting and the Living Data conference – highlighted the growing recognition that open infrastructures like BHL are essential to a connected, equitable biodiversity data landscape.

Final slide of Nicole Kearney’s presentation at the GBIF Governing Board Meeting in Bogotá.

Beyond Bogotá

The conversations that began in Bogotá will continue. BHL will maintain momentum through follow-up discussions with potential supporters, collaborators, and funders, and through ongoing outreach as part of our public fundraising campaign.

These efforts build on the work already underway through the BHL Transition, strengthening partnerships, expanding participation, and helping to secure a sustainable, distributed, and modernized future for the world’s biodiversity knowledge.

Across both events, one message was clear: BHL underpins biodiversity science, and its future depends on our entire global community.

Learn More

🧭 Stay up to date about the BHL Transition via the BHL Blog.
💬 Explore the Living Data 2025 program (recordings are now available)
💚 Support BHL’s future: Donate

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is launching a new public fundraising campaign to help us navigate our transition to independence. This is our first major campaign since the announcement that the Smithsonian Institution can no longer host BHL beyond 2025. Your support now is more critical than ever to secure BHL’s future.

For nearly two decades, BHL has provided free and open access to the world’s biodiversity literature: over 63 million pages from libraries, museums, herbaria, and research institutions across the globe. Since receiving the news that the Smithsonian Institution will cease hosting BHL on 1 January 2026, the global BHL consortium has worked tirelessly to build a foundation for a more autonomous, sustainable, and truly international future. 

With the launch of this campaign, we’re inviting our global community, individuals and institutions alike, to be part of that transformation. 

This campaign builds upon the Call for Support issued earlier this year, which brought together organizations and individuals who expressed their support for BHL’s mission and transition . The public fundraising campaign now extends that invitation to everyone who values open knowledge and biodiversity conservation. We will also continue to welcome institutional partnerships and offers of support from across the global community.

Increased independence will allow BHL to evolve into a more resilient and distributed model, one that reflects the consortium’s global nature. But independence also means that BHL will now rely far more on donations, grants, and external support to sustain its work.

Donations will help cover the real costs of growing and sustaining BHL: expanding our collection, maintaining and improving our technical infrastructure, integrating BHL data into global biodiversity infrastructures, and funding the dedicated staff who make it all possible.

You can now donate directly through our website, with options to make one-time or recurring gifts. Every contribution, no matter the size, will help preserve and connect the world’s biodiversity heritage for generations to come.

We’ll also run themed fundraising drives throughout the year, including Giving Tuesday, Library Lovers’ Day, Earth Day, International Biodiversity Day, and other global events celebrating the importance of shared knowledge in protecting life on Earth.

In addition to individual donations, we invite foundations, philanthropic partners, and legacy donors to join us in shaping BHL’s next chapter. Your investment will help ensure that open access to biodiversity knowledge endures for generations to come.

If you would like to make a major contribution, through a large donation, wire transfer, or bequest, or explore other ways of giving, please visit our Ways to Give page for more information. We welcome conversations with individuals and organizations interested in sustaining BHL’s mission long-term through endowments or planned giving.

All donations will be processed securely through the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), BHL’s fiscal sponsor, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

Your support, individual or institutional, will help BHL weather this transition and emerge stronger than ever. Together, we can ensure that the foundation of our understanding of biodiversity remains freely accessible to everyone, everywhere.

Thank you for your ongoing support.

🤝 Make a Donation

🌱 Spread the word – share BHL’s transition news far and wide

💚 Share the love – use #ILoveBHL on social media

💡 Share your ideas – A New Future for the Biodiversity Heritage Library

📚 Stay up to date about the #BHLTransition on the BHL Blog

The Biodiversity Heritage Library has released an Acknowledgment of Harmful Content to recognize deep prejudices within some of the pages of its collection. As a digital library of natural science publications and archival materials, BHL is a free and open access online resource that primarily reflects the print collections of its contributors. Some of the content in BHL is harmful because it reflects ableist, classist, colonialist, eurocentrist, racist, sexist, xenophobic, and other biased views, especially in descriptions of peoples, lands, and species. The long and, at times, painful history of the scientific record has privileged hegemonic perspectives with the right to print while stifling the voices of the powerless.

Acknowledgment of Harmful Content

The Biodiversity Heritage Library acknowledges the existence of harmful content in many biodiversity science publications and original materials included in its collection. We are reckoning with the, at times, painful heritage of our collection and seeking to address its impact on science and culture today. As a curated digital collection aggregating content from hundreds of providers into a single platform, BHL is a reflection of the historical collection development decisions of those providers as well as the publishing practices and historical colonial processes that have shaped the scholarly record of biodiversity science. Scientific understanding evolves over time, through critical analysis of new information and scrutiny of its mistakes. We recognize that as a free and open access digital library, we simultaneously increase and promote access to materials, some of which espouse deep prejudices that are counterproductive to the advancement of scientific knowledge and overshadow the contributions of marginalized peoples across the globe. At best these views are outdated; at worst, the legacy of natural sciences is unjust and inhumane. The harmful content in BHL’s collection goes against the values of the Biodiversity Heritage Library. It is provided for access as part of the historical record.

BHL joins recent global outcries against racial and environmental injustice. We are assessing our role as a digital library and the responsibility we have to question our neutrality and address harm without reducing access. We are deeply concerned about the continuing crisis of global species loss and the inequitable divisions within our own species. Reflecting on ourselves, we see an organization grappling with inclusion and the acute consequences that these harmful views have on the world and its people today.

Heritage institutions such as the AfricaMuseum, Digital Public Library of America, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, Trove, and others are also addressing these issues. In general the museum and cultural heritage community is reckoning with our organizations’ past and present, as well as the ways in which our collections, publications, public exhibitions and strategic goals impact society.

Over the course of 2020, BHL rethought the implementation of our strategic plan with the goal to challenge ourselves towards more equitable collection management, technical development, outreach, partnership development, and mission enabling practices. With regard to our collection management objectives going forward, we will be:

• publishing a collaborative research bibliography to inform new collection management strategies that focus on global challenges including biodiversity loss, systematic racism, and the effects of a worldwide pandemic on scholarly research,
• identifying and filling gaps in the collection to achieve more complete and inclusive representation of the available knowledge of and perspectives on biodiversity, e.g. including indigenous knowledge,
• and conducting a comprehensive review and revision of our collection development policy.

If “knowing the past is critical to reforming the present” as Dr. David Silverman suggests [1] then publicly acknowledging the biases in our collection is a first step towards making our collection more inclusive. As a global consortium with a variety of social, cultural, epistemological, and political factors at play, we are unified in our commitment to advancing equity in the global biodiversity community while also maintaining access to the historical record.

Sincere thanks to the Biodiversity Heritage Library Collections Committee for participating in many challenging discussions and writing BHL’s Acknowledgment. In addition, we would like to thank BHL’s Executive Committee, Secretariat, as well as BHL Staff and Partners for their careful consideration and feedback. The Acknowledgment would not have been possible without the thoughtful input of our reviewers including: Lidia Ponce de la Vega, Smithsonian Libraries and Archives Diversity Equity Accessibility and Inclusion (DEAI) Committee, as well as colleagues within our professional networks especially Cornell University Library, MBLWHOI Library and the Woods Hole Diversity Advisory Committee, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, and Royal Botanic Gardens Kew.

BHL is pleased to announce that it has added its bibliographic records to OCLC’s WorldCat® database, “the world’s largest network of library content and services.” You can now find BHL e-books via https://www.worldcat.org/. With thousands of libraries worldwide participating in OCLC, contributing our records to this “global library cooperative” allows us to extend the discoverability and access of BHL e-books through its variety of tools and services [1].

If you have access to OCLC metadata service products, please look for the OCLC symbol “BHLMR” when reviewing holdings.

If you are an OCLC participating library interested in adding BHL records to your own catalog, please feel free!

Some key points to keep in mind when viewing or working with BHL records in WorldCat:

• Current BHL holdings in WorldCat reflect our collection’s bibliographic records as of Fall 2019.
• Not every title you find in BHL will be in WorldCat. Only titles with full text available directly within BHL are being provided to OCLC. We are not providing records for titles indexed in our collection that link out to content available via third-party websites.
  • For example, you will find Crawshay’s The birds of Tierra del Fuego (1907) in WorldCat.org. But you will not find Flora Ibérica as this title is indexed in BHL but held directly within the Biblioteca Digital del Real Jardin Botanico de Madrid.
• BHL will load records into WorldCat on a quarterly basis going forward.
• As we curate title records within the BHL collection and make changes on our end, we will work with OCLC to update records on a periodic basis.

We are thankful to the kind folks at OCLC who worked diligently and patiently with us to develop a workflow for exporting and uploading the variety of records aggregated into our digital collection from hundreds of contributors worldwide.

As a new Master of Library and Information Studies graduate, I was looking for opportunities to gain more library experience, especially with regard to cataloguing and metadata. An internet search led me to the many intern opportunities available at Smithsonian Libraries. The Digital Content Intern position at the Biodiversity Heritage Library was a perfect fit for me. It was a virtual position, allowing me the flexibility to stay in Toronto, Canada and maintain a full-time job at a hospital. I completed my entire master’s through an online program from a Canadian university while living in Melbourne, Australia, so I was familiar with working at a distance, independently, and using digital mediums to learn and connect with others.

Valentina Ly

For my internship, I worked with Bianca Crowley, the Digital Collections Manager of the Biodiversity Heritage Library. She taught me about the collaboration and coordination that occurs with the international consortium to get the scanned content, how content gets uploaded, and what metadata elements are added to make sure the content is discoverable for users.  I was tasked with uploading issues for Földtani közlöny, a Hungarian geological society publication, and the Journal of Agricultural Research. The content from these journals go as far back as 1871 and 1913, respectively, and BHL has made it available.

There’s a lot of work that goes into uploading each journal volume and some volumes can be over a thousand pages long, with each page needing metadata added to it.  The 10,870 pages that I uploaded took hours and are just a small drop in the bucket of the total collection, which is still growing! This is a project that deservedly needs a lot of support and manpower.

Screenshot of the Macaw workflow tool used by BHL staff to upload content to and assign metadata for the library.

The process of adding metadata to each page to make it easier for users to find.

Prior to my library degree, I had a career in plant and medical genetics research, so I had access to many articles through my affiliation with universities. All my published genetics research is not easily accessible unless you happen to have a subscription to those journals. Access to information is important to advance scientific research, but subscriptions and pay walls can be a barrier to new knowledge.

An example of the burden of trying to access an article without a subscription. Even authors don’t necessarily have access or rights to their own paper.

As a librarian, providing access to information is an integral part of the profession. It gets even trickier tracking down seminal and older articles published before computers were common tools. The increasing cost of subscriptions to scholarly content is becoming a growing issue, and it is cost prohibitive for academic institutions.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library provides open access to its content, which is a position I can proudly support. Impressively, there are over 145,000 titles and 56 million pages of biodiversity literature available through the Biodiversity Heritage Library! Anyone with an internet connection can immediately access this information and the new full text search of the optical character recognition feature makes it even easier to search.

As a researcher and librarian, I’m glad to have had the opportunity to intern with the Biodiversity Heritage Library. My biggest takeaway from this experience is learning all about this resource and how it freely provides researchers with a wide range of topics and a wealth of information to study and explore.

A: 3

Group photo of CBHL, EBHL, and Linnaeus Link Annual Meeting attendees

As in CBHL (host) + EBHL (host) + BHL (attendees) but there’s always room for more…especially if they are like this group of Brilliant Happy Librarians!

Back in June I attended the 50th Annual Meeting of The Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries (CBHL) which was also host to the 25th anniversary meeting of the European Botanical and Horticultural Libraries Group (EBHL) as well as the 22nd annual meeting of Linnaeus Link partners. The theme of the meeting was “Botanical and Horticultural Libraries in the Modern Era: Training and Vision for the Future” and it encouraged its attendees to “[discuss] how technology has united us and what the future holds in store for us as we enter the new millennium.” The joint meeting was held between the New York Botanical Garden and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Presentations centered around new or revamped digitization projects, implementing electronic access to materials as well as initiatives to better integrate library and archival materials into research discovery systems.

The meeting showcased a variety of digital collections that were new to me such as the Linnean Society’s Online Collections of specimens, manuscripts, correspondence, paintings, and books, many of which were collected, annotated, or written by Linneaus himself! The Royal Horticultural Society’s Lindley Library also gave a presentation about the digitization of its special collections and Fiona Ainsworth of Royal Botanic Gardens Kew shared about the latest projects in her library to digitize rare Chinese illustrations and catalog the Miscellaneous Reports collection in their archives. I was particularly excited to learn about upcoming plans to update the Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid’s Biblioteca Digital for the future.

There were also fascinating presentations on various research projects that made intensive use of the very collections CBHL and EBHL have represented within their organizations. Maura Flannery‘s talk Plants in the Library: The Johannes Harder Herbarium detailed her study of Harder’s 16th century, multi-volume compendium known as a Herbarium vivum. This rare work on botanical collection from German localities was composed by pressing plant specimens directly into the book and illustrating those parts which would not press well such as bulky seeds or stalks. While Maura had the unique chance to see one of these works in person, the rest of us are fortunate enough to have access to this digital copy thanks to the Bayerische StaatsBibliothek. Inspired by the vasculum left to her by her grandmother, Régine Fabri presented on the history of the botanical collecting object. And Eric Sanderson set the perfect backdrop to the meeting by opening it with a discussion of his work on The Welikia Project to detail New York City’s rich ecological history compared with its present urban environment block by block!

This year CBHL honored the work of Susan Fraser, Director of The LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden, with the Charles Robert Long Award of Extraordinary Merit. Knowing Susan for my nearly 10 years with BHL it was no surprise to see her receive this award for her exemplary leadership and dedication to improving the global, digital and scholarly impact of the profession. Congratulations Susan!

Besides the fact that CBHL organization draws on my roots working in the U.S. National Herbarium along with my love of librarianship, a critical purpose of attending this year’s meeting was to network with BHL colleagues from 11 (yes, 11!) of our partner organizations. I had the opportunity to get some face time with colleagues from Botany Libraries/Harvard University, Chicago Botanic Garden, Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden, Missouri Botanical Garden, Museum national d’Histoire naturelle, National Agricultural Library, New York Botanical Garden, and Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, as well as our newest Affiliate partners from the Lloyd Library and Museum, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and University Library Johann Christian Senckenberg. Indeed CBHL, EBHL, and BHL share much more in common than just our acronyms.

The CBHL-EBHL-Linnaeus Link Annual Meeting reminded me of the importance of nurturing a community of like-minded professionals around shared values and interests. Through these communal experiences, botany and horticulture librarians and researchers enrich their ability to support and disseminate relevant resources, including best practices and digital collections. Working almost exclusively in the virtual digital library world, I forget that sometimes the quickest way to exchange information is face to face as it is a deeper impression of knowledge understood and more likely remembered, than the ephemeral information received via electronic exchange. It is truly an enjoyable group that I hope to be able to meet again at future annual meetings.

Bianca Crowley on the Annual Meeting field trip to tour the High Line in New York City

Reflecting back on my experience I am left with one nagging thought about the continued ubiquity of library information silos and the difficulty of practically executing linked open information systems. CBHL and EBHL partners shared information about many digitization projects, many of which contain digital books living separately in their own web spaces. I can’t help but wonder if it would be useful to aggregate these materials under a common access point so that researchers and librarians outside the CBHL/EBHL community could more easily discover them. Could BHL help integrate some of these disparate book collections together? If our shared acronyms are any indicator, this may be an idea worth exploring in the form of deeper collaboration for the future.