Welcome to the Biodiversity Heritage Library Blog

Back in June of 2010, the founding institutions of BHL began a major digitization project that would span the work of 11 years, 9 institutions, 19 people, 40 tickets within BHL’s issue tracking system, over 82 comments on those tickets, and countless hours of work. Was this part of a grant funded project to facilitate the digitization and inclusion of millions of pages into BHL’s collection? No. This body of digitization and curation work revolves around the series of titles that are part of the Journal of The Asiatic Society. By June 2021, BHL was gratified to finally call the digitization of all public domain volumes “complete” to the best of its ability.

For BHL’s content to be truly useful, individual articles need to be discoverable, citable, and connected to the wider scholarly record. Rod Page explores how BioStor has helped uncover more than 260,000 articles in BHL, the importance of article-level metadata and DOIs, and how AI may shape the future of article discovery.

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.

Pliny the Elder’s Natural History is one of the most influential works of the ancient world. This post explores BHL’s 1469 Venice edition, contributed by the Natural History Museum, London — a remarkable incunabulum and the oldest printed book in the BHL collection.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library continued our 20th anniversary celebration at our Annual Meeting in London from 27 April to 1 May. This year, founding members and 10th anniversary co-hosts, the Natural History Museum, London and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, welcomed 46 representatives from 30 institutions across 8 countries to gather and plan for BHL’s future.

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.