In June, BHL was featured in The Guardian’s Age of Extinction series in a wonderful article celebrating the power and importance of open biodiversity knowledge.

The article highlighted BHL’s extraordinary collections, our global community, and the urgent need to sustain BHL for researchers, educators, artists, conservationists, and biodiversity enthusiasts around the world.

The response from the BHL community was immediate and inspiring. Public donations began arriving within minutes of publication. In the first 24 hours after the article went live, BHL received 152 donations, raising USD $10,627.27. This support is helping BHL remain open, connected, and freely available as we continue our first year as an independent global consortium.

Read the article: A bonanza for fans of the natural world: the digital library sharing 64m pages of scientific knowledge with everyone.

BHL has reached a major transition milestone: our servers have successfully moved from the Smithsonian to the Field Museum in Chicago. 

Thanks to careful planning by BHL’s Tech Team and generous support from the Field Museum, the website remained online throughout the process, with only limited temporary impacts to services such as full-text search. Normal use of BHL has now resumed.

We are deeply grateful to the Field Museum for welcoming BHL’s technology and helping ensure that biodiversity knowledge remains available to the global community.

Read more: BHL Servers are Moving!

From 27 April to 1 May, the BHL community gathered in London for the 2026 BHL Annual Meeting, hosted by founding members the Natural History Museum, London and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

The meeting brought together 46 representatives from 30 institutions across 8 countries to reflect on BHL’s first 20 years and plan for its future. Much of the week focused on strategic planning, including BHL’s governance, regional coordination, long-term funding, technical development, and opportunities for deeper collaboration across the biodiversity informatics landscape.

A highlight of the week was BHL Day 2026: Towards a Biodiversity Data Ecosystem Built on BHL Data, a public symposium hosted at the Natural History Museum. More than 120 attendees joined online and in person to explore how BHL data has supported research over the past two decades, and how future developments can strengthen BHL’s role in the wider biodiversity data ecosystem.

Read more: Commemorating 20 Years of BHL at the 2026 Annual Meeting

Over the past year, BHL Transition Director Kelli Trei (pictured right) has provided exceptional leadership through a period of major change for the consortium. In this time-limited role, Kelli worked closely with the BHL Secretariat and Executive Committee to guide transition planning and help lay the foundations for BHL’s next chapter as an independent, globally governed consortium.

We extend our sincere thanks to Kelli for her leadership, dedication, and care throughout this transition. We are also grateful to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library for supporting Kelli’s transition role over the past year. 

BHL’s transition work will continue through the Secretariat, Executive Committee, and consortium community as we move from urgent transition activity toward shaping BHL’s long-term future. 

We also congratulate Kelli on receiving the 2025–2026 Outstanding Faculty Member Award from the University Library at UIUC.

BHL has launched a new Community Forum on Discourse, creating a dedicated space for the global BHL community to connect, share updates, ask questions, and collaborate.

The Forum will support communication across BHL’s increasingly distributed global consortium, helping members, partners, contributors, and working groups stay connected as BHL continues its transition to a more community-led model. It will also provide a place to share news, surface opportunities, and continue conversations beyond meetings and email.

We invite the BHL community to join the Forum, introduce themselves, and explore the latest updates.

Join the BHL Community Forum

BHL is delighted to welcome Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung as a new member of the consortium.

Senckenberg brings deep expertise in natural history research, collections, libraries, and biodiversity knowledge. Its membership strengthens BHL’s global network and brings important new perspectives to the consortium as we continue building a more distributed, collaborative, and sustainable future. A full blog post introducing Senckenberg and its connection to BHL will be published soon.

Read the press release: Senckenberg Joins the Biodiversity Heritage Library

BHL’s 20th anniversary blog series, Treasures from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, continued throughout April, May, and June with stories highlighting remarkable works, collections, and contributions from across the BHL community.

Recent posts in the series have highlighted the extraordinary range of BHL’s collections and community, from Circa Instans, a medieval pharmacopeia and the oldest item in BHL’s collection, to Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, a landmark early printed work once celebrated as BHL’s oldest book.

The series has also explored local naturalists’ newsletters, museum archives, article-level data, and the legacy publications of the Asiatic Society, celebrating not only the remarkable materials in BHL, but also the people, partnerships, and technical work that make them freely accessible to the world.

Explore the series: BHL at 20: Treasures from the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Thank you for being part of the BHL community.

www.biodiversitylibrary.org

204,000+ Titles | 328,000+ Volumes | 64+ Million Pages