What is happening to the Biodiversity Heritage Library collection?

We have received multiple complaints about the duplicate records included in the Biodiversity Heritage Library collection and also about the titles that seem to be duplicates, but are, in fact, separate records published by different publishers. 

The provider's protocol is to list separate coverage for each volume/issue of a journal, because they provide some journals that contain gaps in content. The provider has updated this protocol on their platform: https://about.biodiversitylibrary.org/ufaqs/bhl-kbart-file/

This protocol regarding coverage causes the coverage thresholds to be displayed in our knowledgebase in a very unappealing way-  the coverage statement can contain dozens of lines for each available volume/issue. However, sometimes there is coverage that is displayed properly for these journals as it has been unified within our system. Our system can unify coverage in multiple rows except in a few specific instances. One instance is if the provider sends multiple rows of coverage with the same start and end coverage date. These will be displayed as separate rows in our knowledgebases. This is why some of the journals have a unified coverage and some do not. This coverage protocol ensures that only the available content is displayed for our customers in our discovery tools.

Back in 2023, we have contacted provider and asked to review the title list they are sending to us. As a result, they have acknowledged that there is some amount of duplications in the list and they will be performing a cleanup. We were working with the provider on finding a way to differentiate between the multiple records with identical titles and publication dates that were published by different publishers. Unfortunately, after several months of email exchanges, provider has decided that they do not have resources to perform the cleanup and without this cleanup a development we were planning to add to this title list's preprocessing will only yield a very small number of corrections which makes it irrelevant. 

• Article last edited: 23-OCT-2025