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Reflections on Digitizing Medieval Medical and Botanical History

Last summer, as the Archival Systems Intern for the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden, I had the privilege of uploading several unique new items to the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Among them was one of the earliest Western medical manuscripts, a medieval pharmacopeia known as the Circa Instans. This manuscript, digitized from the New York Botanical Garden’s physical collections, was written in approximately 1190, making it the oldest item in the BHL’s collection. Although I did not know that it would become the BHL’s oldest item when I added it to the library, I nevertheless found myself marveling at the Circa Instans and the history of this particular manuscript.

We uncovered this lovely tome when we were relocating our Museums Victoria Library Collection in 2015-16. It was housed with our run of the Ibis, an important ornithology journal published by the British Ornithologists Union since 1859. However, when we opened it up it was clearly something special.

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.

With the Biodiversity Heritage Library now officially operating in its new chapter following its transition away from the Smithsonian Institution, we are delighted to announce that the Field Museum of Natural History, one of BHL’s longest-standing and most respected partners, will host BHL’s servers and core technical infrastructure.

This hosting arrangement ensures the continued stability, security, and reliability of the BHL website and the 63+ million pages of open biodiversity knowledge it makes freely available worldwide.

As the Biodiversity Heritage Library enters its new chapter following the completion of its transition to a new fiscal sponsor, it is important to acknowledge that BHL’s biggest strength lies not in its platform, nor in its 63 million pages, but in its people.

For nearly two decades, a small, deeply committed team has carried the responsibility of keeping BHL online, stable, and accessible to a global community. Much of that work happens behind the scenes, often invisible to the users who rely on BHL every day. Securing that expertise and institutional knowledge has been a central goal of the BHL transition.

That goal has been achieved: this week marks the completion of staff transitions from the Smithsonian Institution to BHL’s fiscal sponsor, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). All of BHL’s existing staff positions have been secured, preserving the leadership, institutional knowledge, and operational continuity that underpin BHL’s work.

Together, the BHL staff are responsible for implementing the Consortium’s vision, mission, and strategic goals, under the direction of the Members Council and Executive Committee. As BHL moves forward, the people who know the organization best remain at its core. BHL is in excellent hands.