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The Biodiversity Heritage Library has announced a new collaboration with Vanderbilt University’s Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries that will provide digital preservation support for the world’s largest open-access repository of natural history materials. Through the agreement, the Heard Libraries will contribute cloud infrastructure expertise and technical leadership for BHL, which serves as a foundational resource for biodiversity science, taxonomy and conservation research, with more than 63 million pages dating from the 15th to the 21st century.
The Heard Libraries are also the newest member of the BHL Consortium, an international collaboration of natural history museums, botanical gardens and agricultural, biological and university research libraries whose purpose is to make biodiversity literature free and openly available to the world.
“The Biodiversity Heritage Library is the most comprehensive archive of life on Earth ever assembled,” Vanderbilt University Librarian Jon Shaw said. “The scale of this undertaking is difficult to overstate, as BHL reunites holdings that were once separated by geography, language and institutional silos. Because natural history has always been a global enterprise, with specimens crossing oceans and observations made in one hemisphere being debated in another, the library effectively restores that original interconnectedness in a digital form.”
The Heard Libraries are globally recognized for digital preservation and large-scale knowledge stewardship and will ensure the archive’s accessibility, integrity and durability through preservation architecture developed in partnership with Amazon Web Services. “Vanderbilt’s role secures a globally essential scientific resource while reinforcing the university’s commitments to research, education and long-term knowledge preservation,” Shaw said.
A Heard Libraries staff member will serve as associate cloud engineer and be integrated into BHL’s Technical Team to work collaboratively with its leadership as well as partner institutions to strengthen the archive’s technical foundation. The role will contribute expertise in cloud computing, data management, modern application development and digital collections infrastructure, enabling improvements in performance, scalability and long-term sustainability.
“Building a resilient, modern technical foundation is central to BHL’s next chapter, and Vanderbilt’s investment significantly advances this work,” said Colleen Funkhouser, BHL managing director. “We are deeply grateful for Vanderbilt’s commitment and look forward to working closely with the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries on this important endeavor.”
As a BHL member, Vanderbilt joins the consortium’s governance structure and strategic planning processes. While Vanderbilt’s immediate focus within BHL is technical leadership, the university’s scholarly initiatives and collections are of strong interest to the BHL community.
Vanderbilt’s 330-acre Nashville campus is an accredited arboretum, with more than 6,000 identified and geolocated trees and shrubs representing nearly 200 species. The university’s community gardens and native meadow serve as living labs for collaborative research.
Evolutionary Studies at Vanderbilt comprise a transdisciplinary center of excellence engaging students, scholars and the broader community in evolutionary research and outreach. The Heard Libraries have supported this initiative through library exhibits, Biodiversity Day lectures, and events such as the Scopes “Monkey” Trial Centennial Symposium.
Among Vanderbilt’s distinctive collections are the papers of James Hampton Kirkland, Vanderbilt’s second chancellor and a Dykes Medal-winning iris breeder. BHL currently holds some of his titles, including The Iris Offerings of J.H. Kirkland, while Vanderbilt’s Special Collections and University Archives house additional materials.
“BHL plays a critical role in supporting conservation and science, documenting biodiversity history, overcoming research barriers and enabling global collaboration,” said Charles Henry, president of the Council on Library and Information Resources, BHL’s new administrative host. “We welcome Vanderbilt’s membership in the consortium and value the deep expertise in digital stewardship the university brings to BHL’s mission.”
At the heart of this capacity is the Heard Libraries’ Digital Lab, which supports digital projects and scholarship while identifying opportunities to bolster infrastructure and scale engagement, and the Vanderbilt Cloud Innovation Lab for Libraries and Applied Digital Preservation, powered by AWS, designed to support student learning experiences focused on using artificial intelligence and cloud technologies to develop advancements in digital preservation.
One example of success in this area is the Heard Libraries’ stewardship of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, one of the largest collections of U.S. television broadcast news in the world, containing more than 92,000 broadcasts, nearly 600,000 news segments, and some 55,700 hours of runtime to date. The libraries successfully migrated the TV News Archive to the AWS cloud and introduced capabilities such as transcription, translation and enhanced search.
“Vanderbilt’s Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries are a proven leader in digital preservation, infrastructure planning, research-oriented access and managing collections at scale,” said Greg Ritter, strategy lead for Research Data, Scholarly Communication and Libraries at Amazon Web Services. “We look forward to continuing our successful collaborations with Vanderbilt and BHL to make the archive more modern, resilient and openly accessible to researchers and scholars around the world.”