All posts tagged with technical-updates

The big day is here! BHL’s Tech Team is starting the three-week process of moving BHL’s technical infrastructure from the Smithsonian data center just outside of Washington, DC, to the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois.

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.

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.

In the past several weeks, we’ve seen a large, disruptive increase in traffic to the BHL main website. This blog post is meant to summarize the event, the effect on BHL and its servers, our response, and what we have planned should it happen again.

The problems experienced on BHL’s website are not related in any way to the transition away from the Smithsonian. We believe the timing of this activity and the resulting downtime to be purely coincidental.

Our latest newsletter is now available! From collaborative transcription projects to a new Wikimedian-in-Residence, don’t miss the latest news from the BHL community.

Our latest bi-annual newsletter is now available! From flora and fauna in New Zealand to new Affiliates in Belgium and the United States, don’t miss the latest news from the BHL community.

View our November 2023 Bi-annual Newsletter.

Our latest bi-annual newsletter is now available! From BHL Day 2023 in Paris to releasing the new Ukrainian Українська Collection, don’t miss the latest news from the BHL community.