What types of files are available for download?

There are many ways to download resources, and some are better suited for certain purposes than others. Below you will see some common uses suggested on the “useful for” lines, but of course there are many more ways to use the BHL collection.

You can find most of these options when you click on the drop-down menu for “Download Contents” to see various options while viewing a book.

Screenshot of the Biodiversity Heritage Library book viewer showing options in the download contents dropdown menu.

  • View Metadata takes you to the bibliography page for the title.
    • Useful for: citations, bibliographic needs
    • You can also download the MODS for the title from the bibliography page.
  • Select pages to download allows you to generate a custom pdf containing only the pages you need.
  • Download Article allows you to retrieve a PDF of an entire article.
    • Useful for: Quickly and easily downloading an article without having to manually select pages
    • Note that the “Download Article” option will only be available if you are viewing content that has been defined as part of an article. Defining articles in BHL is an ongoing process, and not all articles in the Library have been indexed. Use the “select pages to download” option (above) if “Download Article” is not available.
    • Learn more and see instructions for downloading.
  • Download Book has further options to view:
    • PDF = Download a PDF of the entire volume.
      Useful for: saving or printing the entire book, saving to read on a tablet
    • See instructions for downloading.
    • All = Download all files associated with this book – links to the Internet Archive where you have access to image files, metadata files, and other derivative files – more information about available files including descriptions and file types.
      Useful for: downloading the grayscale/black and white PDF version of a book (if available), and more
    • JP2 = Download ALL the jpeg2000 image files – there is one image per page, and each image file is usually 2-5MB so this can take quite a long time.
      Useful for: saving or printing most of a book in high resolution
    • See instructions for downloading.
    • OCR = Download the plain text of the entire volume. Note: the plain text is created automatically using optical character recognition (OCR) software and has not been corrected or edited by humans.
      Useful for: translating the text, searching for a particular word in a book, copying long passages
  • Download Citation allows you to download the BibTex or RIS files for the volume or part.
  • View at Internet Archive – takes you to a copy of the book at the Internet Archive
    • Useful for: searching inside the book, viewing it in a different interface

Options for downloading images include:

  • Printing or downloading a single page image (screen quality)
  • Downloading a single page image (high quality)
  • Downloading a single image from the BHL Flickr
  • JP2 = Download ALL the jpeg2000 image files in a volume – there is one image per page, and each image file is usually 2-5MB so this can take quite a long time.
    Useful for: saving or printing most of a book in high resolution

Other download options include:

  • Downloading all of the data in BHL
    • Useful for: scientific name research, etc.
    • Learn more.

Learn more about our various download options.