All posts in Tech Updates

On 10 April 2019, we will implement additions and changes to the export files available from the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

The updates involve the following:

1. A new set of exports will be created alongside the existing exports. The new set will contain only data for material that is hosted by BHL. No externally-hosted content will be included in these files. Because these files are added in addition to the existing export files, no existing users should be affected.
2. The BHL author Identifiers will be added to the creator.txt and partcreator.txt tab-delimited files. The format of these files will change to accommodate the additional data; the author identifier will now be the second “column” in each file. Because of this, anyone regularly harvesting from these files may be affected.

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

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).

We’re thrilled to announce that full text search is now available on the Biodiversity Heritage Library!

With this new functionality, search results in the library will display hits for your term in both the bibliographic information (i.e. title, author, subject, publisher, related titles and series, etc.) as well as the full text of books in BHL.

We’re excited to announce that we will soon be launching full text search on BHL!

Welcome to the new and improved BHL blog!

To provide you with a better user experience, we’ve updated the design, navigation and functionality of the BHL blog. Continue reading to learn more about our new features.

HTTPS? What does it mean? HTTP is the language that your browser uses to communicate to BHL and the S stands for Secure, encrypted, unreadable, or at least much, much harder to read.The web is moving to encrypted connections across the board. In 2014 Google announced that their page rank algorithm that decides the order of your google.com search results will now rank insecure pages slightly lower than secure pages. From security to rankings, encrypted connections are better for everyone.