A Digital Library Is Sharing 64 Million Pages of Nature Science With Everyone — for Free

Imagine being able to read a diary written by one of the first scientists to explore Antarctica, or see a drawing of the Tasmanian tiger — an animal extinct for nearly 90 years. You can do all of that, for free, through a website called the Biodiversity Heritage Library, or BHL. Over the past 20 years, this online library has gathered more than 64 million pages of books, journals, field diaries, and illustrations about the natural world. It was built by more than 680 museums, universities, and scientific groups from countries around the globe — but now the library is in danger of shutting down.

The BHL was created about 20 years ago when librarians had a bold idea. What if major museums and universities scanned their old science books and put them in one place online? The goal was to help scientists everywhere study climate change and the loss of wildlife without having to travel to faraway libraries. At the time, the plan felt exciting and brand new.

David Iggulden helps run the BHL and also works at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, England. He says the library is 'absolutely essential' for scientists who study living things. But teachers, artists, historians, and curious people also use it. 'I just get caught up in it sometimes, looking at the various collections,' Iggulden says.

The library holds an incredible range of materials, including published science books, letters, climate records, field diaries, and hand-drawn illustrations. The oldest item is a medical book from around the year 1190, called the Circa instans. It helped people in medieval Europe agree on the names and uses of plants. It was digitized — meaning scanned and put online — by the New York Botanical Garden just last year.

Some of the finds are surprising. One item is a catalog from 1892 made by a London company called Henry Howell & Co., which claimed to be the world's largest maker of walking sticks. It might seem like an odd thing for a science library, but it helps researchers learn about which types of wood were used throughout history. Iggulden calls it 'a really fascinating find.'

One of the most important items is a journal written by Sir Joseph Hooker, a plant scientist who traveled to Antarctica in 1841. His journal includes watercolor paintings of two volcanoes he saw for the first time during his voyage. It is a personal record of his adventure and the incredible sights he saw on that frozen continent.

Nicole Kearney runs the Australian branch of the BHL. She remembers uploading a handwritten field diary about Australian birds and being surprised by who found it useful. A researcher studying river floods contacted her, saying the diary recorded every time a nearby river flooded between 1947 and 1957. 'I thought it was all about birds,' Kearney said.

The BHL has also helped scientists respond to real environmental crises. During the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers used old journals from the library to show that rare Australian orchids had changed where they lived and how many there were. This happened during the devastating 'black summer' wildfires of 2019 and 2020. Because of what scientists found in the BHL, the threatened status of those orchid species was officially updated.

One of Kearney's favorite books is The Mammals of Australia, written by naturalist John Gould in 1863. It features a striking illustration of the Tasmanian tiger, a striped marsupial that looked like a dog or wolf and carried its young in a pouch. The animal was hunted to extinction after being blamed — perhaps unfairly — for killing sheep. 'The last one died in a zoo in Tasmania in 1936,' Kearney says.

Today, the BHL is facing a serious money problem. Earlier this year, the Smithsonian Institution stopped paying for some of the library's staff and technical systems after facing large budget cuts. Iggulden says it costs about one million dollars a year just to keep the library running. 'We only have funding, we estimate, until the end of 2027,' he says.

People who run the BHL believe the library could do much more with more money and technology. They hope to add artificial intelligence tools that could help find patterns across millions of pages of text. They also want better software for reading old handwritten documents and a version of the website that works well on phones and in many languages.

Kearney says the BHL is not just about the past — it is about the future of our planet. She often quotes the famous scientist Charles Darwin, who wrote that studying nature cannot be done well without a great library. 'The BHL is fundamental to our understanding of all the species that we share this world with, and our ability to save them,' she says. Anyone who wants to help keep the BHL alive can donate at biodiversitylibrary.org.