The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), is an international consortium of natural history and botanical libraries that cooperate to digitize and make freely available the biodiversity literature held in their collections. The digitized literature is 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) and links to BHL literature can be found on most EOL species pages.

Biodiversity Heritage Library Resources

Biodiversity Literature on EOL

Learn how to find literature from the Biodiversity Heritage Library on EOL pages.

BHL on EOL.org

BHL Images

Explore vibrant biodiversity images from BHL's Flickr page, many of which are also shared on EOL taxon pages.

BHL Flickr stream

BHL Collections

These collections of BHL materials are focused around themes such as Extinct Species, Rarest of the Rare or Charles Darwin's Library.

BHL Collections

BHL on iTunes

BHL content and collections are available on the iTunes U. You can download PDFs of BHL books to your desktop, iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. 

BHL on iTunesU