Leadership, Fiscal Sponsorship, and Hosting Opportunities

In April 2025, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) released a public statement announcing that the Smithsonian Institution, our administrative and technical host since 2006, will step back from this role as of January 1, 2026. That announcement marked the beginning of a new chapter for BHL: one filled with both challenges and possibilities.

Today, we’re pleased to share the first in a series of monthly blog posts that will provide open updates on the progress of our transition. We know uncertainty can be unsettling, and we want to assure our global users, partners, and supporters that the transition is well underway, and that we are actively building a stronger and more sustainable future for BHL.

From April 7–11, 2025, the global Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) community gathered at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin for the BHL Annual Meeting. Hosted at one of Europe’s premier natural history museums, this year’s event brought together BHL Members, Affiliates and stakeholders for a week of strategic planning and collaboration.

Navigating Transition Amidst Change

BHL Annual Meetings are usually a time for joyous reunions and celebration of shared successes. This year, however, the meeting was shadowed by the recent announcement that BHL must secure alternative funding and find a new institutional host. In the weeks leading up to the Annual Meeting, the original agenda pivoted swifty towards solution-building. While core elements like committee reports and the ever-popular #BHLDay remained, much of the program was reshaped to focus on navigating the transition.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. A global consortium of over 660 contributors, BHL has made more than 63 million pages of biodiversity knowledge freely accessible online. As a cornerstone of biodiversity data infrastructure, it contains the foundation of our understanding of the natural world.

For the past 20 years, the Smithsonian Institution – one of BHL’s 10 founding members – has played the vital role of hosting both the administrative and technical components of BHL. On January 1, 2026, the Smithsonian will no longer host the administrative functions of BHL. This change presents both a new challenge and a new opportunity.

Building a More Resilient BHL: Improving Accessibility and Expanding Global Reach

What does it take to make millions of pages of biodiversity literature accessible to a global audience? For the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) Technical Team, 2024 was a year of transformative milestones, new innovations, and overcoming challenges—all aimed at strengthening BHL’s mission of advancing biodiversity research.

Our latest newsletter is now available! From collaborative transcription projects to a new Wikimedian-in-Residence, don’t miss the latest news from the BHL community.

Sixty-two million pages of scientific text, images, and metadata, representing 500 years of biodiversity data will be openly accessible via the Registry of Open Data on AWS

The BHL Technical Team is thrilled to announce that Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) datasets will be openly accessible on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, thanks to the AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program. Moving BHL data to the cloud allows researchers globally to explore and analyze over 500 years of biodiversity data, enhancing their ability to derive scientific insights from our shared past to inform future global environmental policy.

BHL data is now hosted on AWS, and comprises over 62 million pages of scientific text from the 15th to the 21st centuries. BHL’s vast collection represents an unparalleled biodiversity resource with enormous potential to be used for longitudinal studies and conservation efforts.

We are thrilled to announce the appointment of Tiago Lubiana as the new Wikimedian-in-Residence (WiR) at the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL)! This crucial role, shaped by community-driven recommendations from the Unifying Biodiversity Knowledge to Support Life on a Sustainable Planet white paper, is aimed at advancing BHL’s mission to make biodiversity data more accessible, actionable, and impactful for a sustainable future. As BHL’s new Wikimedian-in-Residence, Tiago will expand BHL’s data presence within Wikimedia platforms, convert legacy data to structured data on Structured Data on Commons for BHL’s vast image collection, and provide training to the broader biodiversity wiki community. His expertise in open science, data modeling, and the semantic web will help connect BHL’s data to the growing biodiversity knowledge graph, fostering collaboration and ensuring our information is accessible, interoperable, and integrated into the emerging semantic web ecosystem.