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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. A global consortium of over 660 contributors, BHL has made more than 63 million pages of biodiversity knowledge freely accessible online. As a cornerstone of biodiversity data infrastructure, it contains the foundation of our understanding of the natural world.

For the past 20 years, the Smithsonian Institution – one of BHL’s 10 founding members – has played the vital role of hosting both the administrative and technical components of BHL. On January 1, 2026, the Smithsonian will no longer host the administrative functions of BHL. This change presents both a new challenge and a new opportunity.

Building a More Resilient BHL: Improving Accessibility and Expanding Global Reach

What does it take to make millions of pages of biodiversity literature accessible to a global audience? For the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) Technical Team, 2024 was a year of transformative milestones, new innovations, and overcoming challenges—all aimed at strengthening BHL’s mission of advancing biodiversity research.

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.

Sixty-two million pages of scientific text, images, and metadata, representing 500 years of biodiversity data will be openly accessible via the Registry of Open Data on AWS

The BHL Technical Team is thrilled to announce that Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) datasets will be openly accessible on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, thanks to the AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program. Moving BHL data to the cloud allows researchers globally to explore and analyze over 500 years of biodiversity data, enhancing their ability to derive scientific insights from our shared past to inform future global environmental policy.

BHL data is now hosted on AWS, and comprises over 62 million pages of scientific text from the 15th to the 21st centuries. BHL’s vast collection represents an unparalleled biodiversity resource with enormous potential to be used for longitudinal studies and conservation efforts.

We are thrilled to announce the appointment of Tiago Lubiana as the new Wikimedian-in-Residence (WiR) at the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL)! This crucial role, shaped by community-driven recommendations from the Unifying Biodiversity Knowledge to Support Life on a Sustainable Planet white paper, is aimed at advancing BHL’s mission to make biodiversity data more accessible, actionable, and impactful for a sustainable future. As BHL’s new Wikimedian-in-Residence, Tiago will expand BHL’s data presence within Wikimedia platforms, convert legacy data to structured data on Structured Data on Commons for BHL’s vast image collection, and provide training to the broader biodiversity wiki community. His expertise in open science, data modeling, and the semantic web will help connect BHL’s data to the growing biodiversity knowledge graph, fostering collaboration and ensuring our information is accessible, interoperable, and integrated into the emerging semantic web ecosystem.

Last month, Smithsonian Libraries and Archives (SLA), Smithsonian Transcription Center (STC), and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) celebrated a significant milestone – technical staff worked collaboratively to integrate over 43,000 pages of transcription materials from STC into BHL. An additional 151,362 scientific name access points have now been added to the BHL search index for SLA archival field notes. These transcriptions enhance BHL’s full-text search, enable taxonomic name recognition, improve accessibility for vision-impaired users, and support climate research.

It’s time to say farewell to my official time with the Biodiversity Heritage Library! As I outlined in my presentation at the 2024 BHL Annual Meeting, when I took over as BHL Program Director in April 2012, I had a firm and successful organization to lead. And all that success rests on the shoulders of the countless staff in BHL partner organizations around the world.