How does full text search work?

BHL’s full text search functionality uses the ElasticSearch engine to try and find your search term(s) within:

— the bibliographic metadata about the items in BHL’s collection and
— the Optical Character Recognized (OCR) text from digitized page images.

Learn more about OCR and how BHL uses it.

Tags: technical development, user interface, search inside

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Empowering Global Research

BHL supports research across the globe and in a variety of disciplines. Explore more BHL user testimonials.

Having access to this literature through BHL is a treasure. Being able to show the students the original publications...speaks volumes.

Dr. Tracey Hunter-Doniger

College of Charleston

BHL is a wonderful resource. I use a lot of old and obscure resources in my line of work, and BHL makes getting access to these sources a lot easier.

Dr. Paul D. Brinkman

North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences

As a free, mobile archive for natural history literature, BHL is ideal for 21st century research, which can happen on the field, in a museum, or at a coffee shop, as long as there’s internet connectivity.

Dr. Nicholas Pyenson

Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is an amazing resource for visual artists! Any artist interested in learning about natural history and science would consider these rare resources invaluable.

Emily Williams, MFA

Troy University

BHL is doing a wonderful service for researchers like me, who work with limited resources in developing countries like India. BHL has had a big, positive impact on my research.

Dr. Varad B. Giri

National Centre for Biological Sciences

BHL is an incredible resource. It provides access to material that is otherwise hard to get and enables me to undertake detailed searches of these sources.

Dr. Karen Sayer

Leeds Trinity University