BHL at a glance
The Biodiversity Heritage Library, or BHL, is an online open-access archive that compiles global literature about biodiversity, very broadly understood. BHL’s homepage reads “The Biodiversity Heritage Library improves research methodology by collaboratively making biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community.” This goal has greatly determined the work of BHL, which has established partnerships with institutions around the world that contribute materials to BHL’s collections. BHL’s global nodes include BHL Europe, Australia, Singapore, China, Africa, Mexico, and SciELO, the node for Brazil. Additionally, in 2021, BHL published their Acknowledgement of harmful content, in which the Library recognizes the colonial and biased nature of many of its materials, and incorporated an option for users to review harmful content.
Questioning biodiversity knowledge in BHL
If you are anything like me, you might be skeptical about terms used in BHL’s homepage, such as collaboration, open availability or open access, the world, and, “a global biodiversity community.” Biodiversity has been historically, culturally, and scientifically understood as a system to which we—biotic beings—all belong and where we act as key agents of different environments. However, when it comes to knowing biodiversity, that is, studying, compiling, archiving, selecting, accessing, annotating, and curating knowledge about biodiversity, the commonality of biodiversity might not be as common as we may think.
In this sense, I argue that we must ask fundamental questions when thinking about biodiversity collections. First, regarding globality, who belongs to the “global biodiversity community” that BHL seeks to build? Considering that BHL is not only disseminating biodiversity knowledge but biodiversity heritage, yet another key question to ask is whose biodiversity heritage does BHL represent and disseminate? Finally, if we are to achieve a biodiversity community, that means BHL seeks to promote inter and intraspecies relations with our human and nonhuman kin. Therefore, the final question I propose is what bio-diverse relationships does BHL enable?
In each of these questions, an underlying question of absence emerges as well:
Who does not or cannot belong to the “global biodiversity community” that BHL seeks to build? Whose biodiversity heritage does BHL exclude? What bio-diverse relationships does BHL prevent?
My challenge of biodiversity knowledge through BHL is thus rooted in a reflection on colonial histories and biases and a push for decolonial approaches to biodiversity collections.
If you want to learn more about how these questions and concepts manifest in online biodiversity collections, please read about the case study of Panama that I describe on my research page.
Collaborating with BHL
In 2020, I was invited by BHL’s former Outreach and Communication Manager, Grace Constantino, to write a guest post for BHL’s blog. This first blog post, “Towards Online Decoloniality: Globality and Locality in and Through the BHL” focused on the general panorama of BHL’s representation of Latin American biodiversity and the opportunities and challenges of the Library in promoting access and participation among Latin American audiences.
After the publication of this blog post, BHL’s Secretariat invited me to be a guest keynote speaker at their Annual Meeting “BHL Day 2021: Reflections in Crises.” In my talk, I presented my findings around BHL’s partnership with Mexico’s Comisión Nacional para el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad (CONABIO), emphasizing the decolonial possibilities of multilingual and multicultural representation in BHL.
By considering the case of Pyrostegia venusta and BHL’s hashtag campaign, #HerNaturalHistory, I argued for a reassessment of the historical and present bio-diverse relationships that BHL represents and erases, advocating for multilingualism, diversified global partnerships, and inclusive schemas for the participation of marginalized and Indigenous communities.
In the summer of 2021, following my keynote address, I worked as a collections analysis intern for BHL under the supervision of Program Director Martin Kalfatovic. My internship comprised two main tasks. First, I collaborated with the Collections Committee, particularly with Digital Collections Manager Bianca Crowley, in presenting specific guidelines for the diversification of the Library’s collection practices. This collaboration included providing input for the development of anti-racist and anti-colonial language for BHL’s “Acknowledgment of harmful content.” For the second component of my internship, I performed data collection to identify colonial gaps in the Library’s narratives. I focused on identifying metadata patterns that could point to important colonial biases and omissions in BHL’s collections, particularly in the representation of Latin America and her biodiversity. My work on metadata during this internship resulted in a two-part blog series, “Understanding BHL through Metadata: Patterns of Bio-Diverse Knowledge Production” (part 1) and “The Geopolitics of Metadata: Knowing Panama through the Biodiversity Heritage Library” (part 2).
Lidia Ponce de la Vega, Ph.D. 