BHL now includes a new content format called “virtual items,” a new deliverable on our 2024 Technical Priorities. These virtual items are different from traditional items, or journal volumes, in BHL’s collection that have been digitized from the physical version. Virtual items are comprised of individual born-digital articles that have been virtually assembled, in chronological … Read more
Status Update: February 19, 2026 BHL has been experiencing intermittent disruptions to its website due to significant bot traffic surges. Bots are software programs that automate repetetive tasks at scale. Unfortunately these bots can generate so much traffic to BHL’s servers that the system gets overwhelmed. While mitigation strategies, like firewalls, are in place to … Read more
In addition to the information provided in the BHL FAQ, many of our consortium partners have created training materials about BHL collections and services. You can explore these materials below: BHL LibGuides from Partners Harvard Library BHL LibGuide: https://guides.library.harvard.edu/bhlguide University Library at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign BHL LibGuide: https://guides.library.illinois.edu/BHL Training Videos Training videos created by BHL … Read more
BHL is committed to maintaining persistent and open access to the materials in our collection. We make our best effort to incorporate materials that are relevant to the broad scope of biodiversity, high quality digital copies, and free of copyright restriction or otherwise contributed with permission from copyright holder. Due to the nature of the … Read more
Depending on your connection speed it may take some time to download a PDF generated using the “Select pages to download” feature. Our custom PDF files can sometimes be very large in file size. If you have trouble loading the PDF file on your machine, try finding the downloaded PDF file (in your downloads folder) … Read more
Sometimes our “Select pages to download” feature, also known as our custom PDF generator, may experience temporary technical difficulties that may delay or, at worst, prevent your PDF from successfully reaching your email Inbox. We apologize for the error and kindly request that you try to generate your custom PDF once again. Depending on your … Read more
If you cannot find what you are looking for in the BHL collection, please consider submitting a Scanning Request via our webform. We will do our best to process your request as time allows. Please keep in mind that we may be limited in our ability to fulfill requests depending on the holdings of BHL … Read more
If the BHL website is down, please monitor our status on Bluesky @biodivlibrary.bsky.social. If BHL is down, you can access content from the biodiversity collection in Internet Archive — please note that BHL’s collection in IA only includes items contributed from our consortium partners. If the BHL website is available but page images for books … Read more
If you notice a problem with the BHL website or an error with any of the materials in our collection, please let us know by filling out our feedback form at http://biodiversitylibrary.org/contact. BHL is voluntarily staffed by our Partner Libraries and we are limited in our ability to respond personally to each contact with our … Read more
BHL’s full text search is searching the generally uncorrected text derived through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for your term. Since this OCR is automatically-generated and uncorrected, it may be incomplete or have errors that prevent the search engine from locating all instances of your term. Tags: troubleshooting, quality control, quality assurance, QA