Status Update: October 28, 2024, 11:30 EDT
The BHL website is currently available. The Internet Archive is back online, though maintenance and upgrades continue until the site is fully restored. If archive.org access is disrupted again, BHL page images will not load.
Why aren’t page images loading in BHL?
BHL serves its page images directly from the Internet Archive, our digitization partner. Outages affecting archive.org directly affect the availability of BHL materials.
What happened to archive.org?
Starting on October 8, archive.org and the Internet Archive experienced a significant cyber attack, resulting in a systems outage, defacement of the website, and in a separate incident, a breach of user data. For security reasons, the Internet Archive chose to take its sites and services offline to focus on securing, prioritizing, and preparing systems to be restored incrementally. Visit the Internet Archive blog for more information on the attacks.
Can I still use BHL while archive.org is offline?
Many BHL services remain available even when page images are not loading.
You can:
- Search the collection
- Search for scientific names
- View or download OCR text of page images
- Download PDFs for individual articles
- View over 300,000 BHL images via Flickr
Can I view BHL items on other platforms?
BHL is a global consortium housing contributions from partners around the world. Our partners have contributed their content to a number of platforms. You can find portions of BHL’s collection in these other repositories:
- Academy of Natural Sciences, Art Collection Guide
- AnimalBase
- American Museum of Natural History Library Digital Repository
- Bibliotheca Alexandrina – contains snapshot of 100,000+ BHL volumes via Advanced Search
- Botanicus
- Cornell University Library Digital Collections
- Digital library of the Caribbean
- Digitale Sammlungen– Bavarian State Library via the Munich Digitization Center
- Europeana
- Field Museum Annual Reports
- Harvard Digital Library Series
- “Dumbarton Oaks Digitization Project. Garden and Landscape Studies. Rare books”
- “Nature Prints from the Botany Libraries”
- Archival collections
- Hathi Trust – primarily Google Books scans but some other things as well
- Gallica (Bibliothèque nationale de France)
- German Botanical Journals Collection, 1753-1914
- Illinois Digital Archives, Chicago Botanic Garden
- Library and Archives Canada Collection Search
- Library of Congress Digital Collections
- Linda Hall Library
- Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle
- New York Botanical Garden Digital Library
- Real Jardín Botánico, CSIC Digital Library
- SciELO.org
When will BHL services be fully restored?
Archive.org came back online on Monday 21 October in read-only mode. At that time, most page images were once again viewable in BHL. Some BHL page images may still be unavailable until all IA services are fully restored.
BHL resumed its custom PDF generator and processed the backlog of requests. Some requests may encounter missing page images until IA services are fully restored.
Archive.org has not resumed all services, so BHL partners are not yet uploading new content to the Internet Archive, and therefore no new content is being contributed to BHL at this time. Our partners will resume contributions when archive.org services are fully restored.
Where can I get the latest updates?
For the latest status updates on BHL services, follow @biodivlibrary.
For the latest status updates on Internet Archive services, follow their official accounts on Twitter/X, Bluesky or Mastodon.