All posts in Tech Updates

BHL was pleased to have the results of their participation in the 2018 LIS Education and Data Science for the National Digital Platform (LEADS-4-NDP) shared via a poster at the 2019 iConference held at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) from 31 March – 3 April, 2019. The LEADS program, funded by the Institution of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and led by Drexel’s Metadata Research Center, supported ten Fellows in 2018 to develop data science skills by contributing to fast-paced, 10-week projects at several different host sites throughout the US. This conference provided an opportunity to present BHL’s LEADS project alongside those from two other 2018 LEADS Fellows as well some Fellows who were recently selected for the 2019 program.

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.