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Biodiversity Heritage Library

Archives · Biodiversity Heritage Library consortium, with the Smithsonian Libraries

  • Details checked
  • Access confirmed

Scanned natural history and life sciences literature, from early floras and faunas to society journals, free to read and download.

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Before you rely on itCoverage is historical rather than current, and OCR of old type and handwriting can be poor, so searching by title or author works better than full text.

The right place for original species descriptions, historic taxonomy and the older literature a biology dissertation has to cite.Community pick

Details

How you get in
Free to readOpen to anyone, no account needed.
Rights
Mixed rightsHoldings differ: check the statement on the item itself.
Subjects
Biology · Earth sciences · History · Medicine
Formats
Scan · PDF · Web
Languages
Mainly English, with substantial Latin, German and French holdings
Size
tens of millions of scanned pages of natural history literature
Run by
Biodiversity Heritage Library consortium, with the Smithsonian Libraries

What we checked

  • Details checked

    The name, address and search page were opened and checked against each other. Last run .

  • Access confirmed

    How you get a book here, and on what terms, was read from the library’s own statement. Last run .

  • Used and reviewed

    Not checked yet. That is not a failure; it only means nobody has done this one.

Every library here is authorised; shadow libraries are not listed. What the marks cover

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