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As I am wrapping up a short 10-week virtual internship with the Biodiversity Heritage Library, I believe that I will look back on this experience as one of those pivotal opportunities that impact the course of life.

The internship was made possible by the LIS Education and Data Science for the National Digital Platform (LEADS-4-NDP) fellowship program through Drexel University and funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, in collaboration with BHL. LEADS-4-NDP has a mission to improve library services by providing LIS (Library and Information Science) educators and researchers with data science skills.

BHL offered an ideal data science challenge for a future LIS scholar like me to explore: a huge dataset of documents spanning five centuries, along with an engaged community of users and researchers interested in extracting new knowledge from these fascinating texts!

We’re excited to announce the launch of the new About BHL site!

What is BHL’s history? Who’s involved in the Library? What tools and services does BHL offer? How do you search, download content or access data and developer tools in BHL? How can you get involved in the Library? What projects has BHL engaged in?

Find the answers to these questions and much more information about the Biodiversity Heritage Library on our new About site at about.biodiversitylibrary.org!

The new site, which lives alongside and is linked from our digital library portal at

The passenger pigeon’s demise is one of the most infamous examples of human-caused extinction. Once the most abundant bird species in North America, it was hunted relentlessly, with large-scale commercial hunting facilitated by railroad distribution placing excessive pressure on the species. The population declined from billions to none in less than one hundred years.

The last passenger pigeon, Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoological Garden at about 1pm on September 1, 1914.

While stories of passenger pigeon flocks blackening the skies underscore the species’ once staggering abundance, its distribution was concentrated in the eastern United States. But could there have been resident populations in the western U.S.?

Passenger pigeon bones uncovered from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, California inspired Dr. Libby Ellwood to ask this very question and embark on a research project empowered by the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s collections.

As part of BHL’s mission to ‘improve research methodology by making biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community’, the BHL Secretariat and Partners regularly participate in meetings and initiatives centered on collaborating with other biodiversity organizations throughout the world. One such recent event was the 2nd Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference (GBIC2) held in Copenhagen from 24-27 July 2018.

Organized by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the meeting convened stakeholders from across the biodiversity informatics community to explore a model for coordinating across geographic and political boundaries to share and link data managed by various biodiversity infrastructures. GBIC2 was organized to build on outcomes and recommendations from the first GBIC meeting held in 2012. The Global Biodiversity Informatics Outlook (GBIO) framework (pictured below), developed as part of that first GBIC meeting, served as a foundation for exploring various considerations–from the cultural to the technological–involved in managing and sharing resources related to biodiversity data, evidence, and understanding.

Version 3 of the BHL API has been launched.

The development of a new API version was spurred by the recent introduction of full-text search to the BHL web site. In addition to the inclusion of full-text search, the entire API has been examined and updated. New methods have been added, existing methods have been modified, and many methods have been dropped entirely (or incorporated into other methods).

On behalf of the Biodiversity Heritage Library community, the BHL Executive Committee, chaired by Constance Rinaldo (Ernst Mayr Library, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University) and the BHL Secretariat, led by Martin Kalfatovic (Smithsonian Libraries),  offer our condolences for the irreparable losses sustained by the National Museum of Brazil (Museu Nacional) in the tragic fire of 2 September 2018.

BHL staff are currently in communication with our colleagues at BHL SciELO in São Paulo to expedite processing of additional volumes of Archivos do Museu Nacional do Rio de Janeiro for the BHL. We are also exploring additional ways that the BHL’s extensive collection of biodiversity literature can support the work of researchers and scholars of the National Museum.

Em solidariedade ao Museu Nacional do Brasil.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library

My first experience with the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) occurred during my search for information on a certain gastropod, Tegula patagonica, for a biological research paper on the relationship between the abundance of marine gastropod shells and varying beach substrates in coastal Patagonia. I had just returned to Cornell University from field research in Bahía Bustamante, a small coastal town in Argentina, and I needed to begin compiling my research into a paper. However, there was one small catch – because Bahía Bustamante had no reliable internet connection, I had been unable to research the shells I was using for my project while in the field. Therefore, upon returning to Cornell, I had to first identify every shell I had used to the species level, and then research each species before I could even begin to write my paper.

The BHL proved the most useful resource in my search for information on Patagonian gastropods. By typing in Tegula patagonica alone, I found results not only in English and Spanish (which I could read and use for my paper), but also various other languages such as German, French, and Portuguese. Furthermore, I did not even have to leave my room to access these materials.