The BHL consortium works with the international taxonomic community, publishers, bioinformaticians, and information technology professionals to develop tools and services to facilitate greater access, interoperability, and reuse of content and data.

In partnership with the Internet Archive and through local digitization efforts, BHL's portal provides free access to hundreds of thousands of volumes, comprising over 59 million pages, from the 15th–21st centuries.

The global BHL project is managed primarily by the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.), Natural History Museum (London), and Missouri Botanical Garden.

[5] There is an online BHL portal featuring Google Maps API integration, AJAX, tag clouds, and JPEG2000 images that facilitate multi-resolution zoom and pan.

[8] In March 2012, the Missouri Botanical Garden received $260,000 in funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to identify and describe natural history illustrations from the digitized books and journals in the online Biodiversity Heritage Library.

The Art of Life project[9] will develop software tools for automated identification and description of visual resources contained within the more than 100,000 volumes and 38 million pages of core historic literature made available through BHL digitization activities.

The annual award program honors visionary applications of information technology promoting positive social, economic, and educational change.

The award recognizes collection action over individual achievement and honors community-minded capacity building in digital libraries, archives and museums.

[15] The primary funding for the Biodiversity Heritage Library came via the Encyclopedia of Life through a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.