All posts in BHL News

BHL is delighted to welcome Amanda Boczar and Leora Siegel to two newly created positions on its Executive Committee, bringing new capacity, experience, and perspectives to help guide BHL through its next chapter.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library welcomes Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung as its newest Member. Dr. Jana Hoffmann reflects on how Senckenberg’s specialized libraries will help connect historical biodiversity literature to the collections, data, and research infrastructures that support science today.

The big day is here! BHL’s Tech Team is starting the three-week process of moving BHL’s technical infrastructure from the Smithsonian data center just outside of Washington, DC, to the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library continued our 20th anniversary celebration at our Annual Meeting in London from 27 April to 1 May. This year, founding members and 10th anniversary co-hosts, the Natural History Museum, London and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, welcomed 46 representatives from 30 institutions across 8 countries to gather and plan for BHL’s future.

Over the past year, BHL has been forced to contend with the issue of AI Bot (short for robot) Crawlers and the effect of their unreasonable requests for BHL’s content. I say unreasonable because while BHL’s content is made freely available and is probably beneficial to modern LLMs, the behavior of these bots and their disruptive effect on BHL has proven that they are bad partners in the exchange of information.

BHL is not the only organization to contend with this in recent months. Other cultural heritage organizations have reported the same or similar experiences, most notably this detailed report from Michael Weinberg at the GLAM-E Lab.

By the time this and other articles had been posted in mid-2025, BHL had already crested the first wave of interruptions.

We are delighted to announce a new collaboration between the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and Vanderbilt University’s Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries that will provide digital preservation support for the world’s largest open-access repository of natural history materials. Through the agreement, the Heard Libraries will contribute cloud infrastructure expertise and technical leadership for BHL, which serves as a foundational resource for biodiversity science, taxonomy and conservation research, with more than 63 million pages dating from the 15th to the 21st century.

In 2026, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is celebrating twenty extraordinary years of global collaboration, discovery, and open biodiversity knowledge.

For two decades, BHL has united libraries, museums, herbaria, and research institutions worldwide to make biodiversity literature freely accessible to anyone, anywhere. What began as a collaborative digitisation initiative is now the world’s largest online library of biodiversity literature and an essential foundation for research, conservation, and data integration.

To mark this milestone, we are launching a special anniversary blog series – BHL at 20: Treasures from the Biodiversity Heritage Library – highlighting remarkable works from across BHL’s collection. These treasures will include rare and historic volumes, medieval manuscripts, richly illustrated monographs, handwritten field diaries, scientific notebooks, specimen registers, society newsletters, and modern journals. Together, they will reveal the depth, diversity, and enduring relevance of our biodiversity knowledge across time.