"Inspiring discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge."

Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a massive digitization project which provides free online access to biodiversity literature and archives from prestigious institutions around the world. BHL was founded in 2005 and the BHL consortium strives to improve research methodology through partnerships with these institutions in order to make biodiversity literature openly available, thus building a global biodiversity community. Biology as a broader field relies on historic literature which too often is in no condition to be shipped across the world to researchers who require access to this wealth of knowledge, and BHL strongly believes that this literature should be accessible in order to strengthen the field. Thus, the BHL consortium members work to digitize as much material as possible so that the knowledge is available freely.

BHL has grown since 2009 to exist across the globe, expanding from the original 10 libraries in the United Kingdom and the United States. Now, BHL has 19 members and 19 affiliates. University of Toronto Libraries is the only Canadian member of BHL. 

BHL currently has 57 collections available which are categorized by themes curated to help users find what they need. In the field of Geology, BHL has collections such as:

• Antarctic Geological Field Notebooks
• Fossil Stories
• BHL Australia
• BHL China
• BHL Europe
• BHL Singapore
• Celebrating Alfred Russel Wallace
• Library of Congress
• Smithsonian Field Books collection

You can navigate BHL's themed collections for more details.

This page was compiled by Isis Clara Luca.