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talk · Monday 21 September · 14:00–⁠14:15 · Aula

Building a New Foundation for the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Nicole Kearney · Monday plenary programme

Recording time 4:46–18:49Open on Vimeo ↗

Summaries and key moments are machine-produced. Check the recording for the speaker’s exact words.

The short versionBHL has survived losing its Smithsonian home by becoming an independent, globally governed consortium, but its future is still not secure and it needs community support.

Overview

What this was about

Nicole Kearney told the story of how the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) survived the Smithsonian's 2025 decision to stop hosting it from 1 January 2026. BHL moved its financial and legal home to the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), the Field Museum took over web and technical hosting, and new members supplied technical support. Public fundraising now matters for the first time. She said BHL is only secure through 2027, described the platform modernisation now under way, and asked the community for partnerships and funding.

Why it matters. BHL is a core infrastructure for taxonomy and biodiversity knowledge, and its near-collapse shows how fragile long-running community infrastructures are when they depend on one institutional host.

Key ideas

In the room

  • BHL is a consortium of 684 contributing organisations with more than 64 million freely accessible pages, full-text search and taxonomic name recognition.
  • BHL has added article data to scholarly articles and assigned DOIs to more than 80,000 of them, including retrospective DOIs for historic species descriptions.
  • In April 2025 the Smithsonian said it would stop hosting BHL (secretariat staff, technical team, seven servers and the website) from 1 January 2026.
  • BHL moved to CLIR as its financial and legal home, which lets it accept donations, apply for grants and manage staff contracts on its own.
  • New members stepped in: University of South Florida Libraries (three years of support for BHL's metadata collection workflow system), Vanderbilt University (an associate cloud engineer) and a third organisation (ASR 'Zenberg Nature Support', probably Senckenberg). The Field Museum now hosts the website and infrastructure; the move from Washington DC to Chicago finished at the end of June.
  • BHL's July user survey put enhanced text search first, then image search and a better page viewer. These drive a platform modernisation towards a cloud-based, machine-actionable, linked-data platform with better APIs and persistent identifiers.
  • Public fundraising: the Give BHL Wings campaign reached US$50,000 on New Year's Eve, a Guardian feature brought in more than US$10,000 in one day, and online donations have passed US$100,000 from more than 1,750 donors in 48 countries.
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Transcript

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Programme abstract

Building a New Foundation for the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Nicole Kearney

In 2025, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), one of the world’s most critical resources of biodiversity knowledge, was placed at risk when its long-term host, the Smithsonian Institution, announced it would cease to host BHL's administrative and technical operations. This triggered a rapid, international response and a transition to a distributed, autonomous, community-supported global consortium.

In 2026, BHL is celebrating both its 20th anniversary and its first year operating independently. This presentation provides an overview of that transition, highlighting new governance and funding approaches, diversified technical and institutional support, and the role of transparent, community-driven communication in maintaining trust and engagement during a period of significant uncertainty.

With this new foundation in place, BHL is now well positioned to advance its role within the biodiversity informatics ecosystem as core infrastructure linking literature with taxa, specimens, institutions, and datasets across centuries. This creates new opportunities to enhance the accessibility, discoverability, and interoperability of biodiversity knowledge, supporting large-scale text and image mining, knowledge graph development, persistent identifier integration, and emerging AI-driven applications.

While BHL’s long-term sustainability is not yet fully secured, it is rapidly filling with opportunities. As the opening presentation for this symposium, this talk sets the stage for the presentations that follow, framing BHL’s evolution and the possibilities ahead, and inviting participants to engage with how biodiversity literature can be transformed into data, connections, and new forms of knowledge.

Submitted to the conference programme before the talk, so the talk itself may differ.