All posts by Joel Richard

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.

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.

Optical character recognition (OCR) plays a critical part in BHL’s contributions to the scientific community. OCR in and of itself is a remarkable achievement, converting images of typewritten text to computer-readable text with “pretty good” accuracy. OCR on handwritten text is an even greater challenge to address and is beyond the scope of the improvements discussed here. The scientific work that BHL supports demands the best accuracy that we can provide using available tools, and let’s be honest, available budgets.

Recently, our colleagues at the Internet Archive made the transition away from the ABBYY FineReader OCR software to the Tesseract Open Source OCR engine. Over the past year or more, the OCR team at the Internet Archive has adapted and fine-tuned Tesseract to their workflows. Our first impression is that Tesseract OCR is more than “pretty good” in its ability to identify text from the page images provided to it.

The downside to this is that the Internet Archive has rightfully chosen to not re-process all existing text content through the Tesseract OCR engine. This is a prohibitively expensive and time-consuming prospect given that they have 35 million text-based items and reprocessing them would take several years and use up resources that could otherwise be used for gathering new content.

However, in the interests of supporting the efforts of the BHL community, the BHL Tech Team is working with our Internet Archive partner to reprocess some of BHL’s oldest content with the newest available version of Tesseract OCR. We are currently in a testing phase, and this blog post details some of our early results.

The BHL Tech Team is pleased to announce a new form of content available in BHL: Article PDFs. While this may not sound like anything new, after all, we have had a tool to download PDF content for some time, this update changes both how the PDFs are created and maintained, and how BHL is viewed by content aggregators on the internet, most notably Unpaywall.

The BHL website was recently updated for new fields to download content. The TSV Data Exports are being updated to mirror this change. Please review these changes if you rely on the field order instead of the field names of the TSV file.

The Global Names Project held a workshop on 17-19 June 2019 on the Campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The workshop was titled Scientific names indexing and data mobilization of Biodiversity Heritage Library using tools from Global Names project and was hosted by the Species File Group at the  Illinois Natural History Survey. Eighteen people attended representing a variety of organizations interested in BHL content: Global Names Architecture, iDigBio, TaxonWorks, UIUC Species File Group, the Illinois Library, Encyclopedia of Life, the DINA Project, the Catalogue of Life, GBIF, Species File Group Argentina, the HathiTrust Research Center, and Global Biotic Interactions.