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The Castlemaine Field Naturalists Club in Central Victoria, Australia, is celebrating its 50th year in 2026. Since its inception in March 1976, the Club has produced a monthly newsletter for members. All issues are available on the Club’s website and through the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). Through BHL, they are fully searchable, meaning that species names, locations, and historical observations can be discovered by researchers anywhere in the world. This ensures that local knowledge contributes to a global, interconnected biodiversity resource.

One of the most vibrant and colourful volumes available on BHL from the Museums Victoria Archives is the Economic Botany Fruit and Vegetable Specimen Register (ITM Register) created by Industrial and Technological Museum (ITM) model makers and used as a reference when producing the Wax Fruit Collection. This collection dates from when the ITM (now Museums Victoria) opened to the public in 1870.

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.

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.

Last month, Smithsonian Libraries and Archives (SLA), Smithsonian Transcription Center (STC), and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) celebrated a significant milestone – technical staff worked collaboratively to integrate over 43,000 pages of transcription materials from STC into BHL. An additional 151,362 scientific name access points have now been added to the BHL search index for SLA archival field notes. These transcriptions enhance BHL’s full-text search, enable taxonomic name recognition, improve accessibility for vision-impaired users, and support climate research.

In the face of climate change and environmental challenges, understanding and documenting Earth’s biodiversity is essential. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) serves as a global repository for biodiversity data, playing a pivotal role in this critical mission of safeguarding our planet’s biodiversity. Species occurrence data sourced from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) provides insights into species distributions, behaviors, and interactions much deeper into time, offering key species baseline data required to effectively address the climate crisis. Without accurate and comprehensive data in GBIF, our collective ability to track environmental changes and make informed decisions is severely hampered.

As a GBIF participant node, BHL is committed to sharing biodiversity data openly, adhering to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics) data principles, and collaborating with a global network of biodiversity organizations to bolster and build capacity to strengthen the biodiversity information infrastructure. To honor our commitments, technical staff from BHL are working to establish a scalable data pipeline of occurrence data currently trapped in archival field notes, journals, letters, correspondence, and other primary source materials. The journey has been an arduous one due to poor OCR (optical character recognition) data quality for BHL’s sub-corpus of handwritten materials.