Welcome to the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries that cooperate to digitize and make accessible the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections and to make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global “biodiversity commons.” BHL also serves as the foundational literature component of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL). BHL content may be freely viewed through the online reader or downloaded in part or as a complete work in PDF, OCR text, or JPG2000 file formats. For help with downloading content, please see the Tutorials page.

To perform a simple search of BHL, enter an EXACT PHRASE such as "proceedings of the academy" (without quotation marks). Entering keywords such as "proceedings academy" will not return results.

For advanced search options, please use the Books/Journals, Authors, Subjects, Scientific Names, or Citation Finder (BETA) tabs above.

Biodiversity Heritage Library uses uBio's TaxonFinder, a taxonomic name recognition algorithm, to search through all of the texts digitized in BHL and extract the scientific names. Searching for a name will return a list of all the individual pages where that name occurs. NOTE: The text is currently uncorrected text automatically generated from Optical Character Recognition (OCR) programs and is of variable quality for each scanned book.

Here are some examples of scientific names that you can find in the Biodiversity Heritage Library:

The Citation Finder uses the Biodiversity Heritage Library's OpenURL resolver to search for individual pages in books and journals. OpenURL provides a standard way for computer systems to link citations to the resource that the citation describes. (More information about BHL's OpenURL resolver can be found here.) Citation Finder puts a user-friendly interface on top of the OpenURL resolver. An example usage of the Citation Finder is locating an article that starts on a particular page in a particular volume of a journal.

Citations are returned when appropriate page metadata exists. Please let us know if a page in BHL is not being found by Citation Finder.