A program of The Biodiversity Group
The Biodiversity Library, made searchable
The Biodiversity Group maintains a reference library of more than 2,000 volumes on biodiversity. Ask Darwin is the research tool that lets our community of nonprofits and researchers search that collection by question rather than by catalogue — and get answers cited back to the paper and page they came from.
A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. The Biodiversity Group · biodiversitygroup.org/library
What the collection holds
The physical library runs to roughly 2,000 volumes — about half devoted to reptiles and amphibians, the remainder covering the wider tree of life. Holdings are organised by subject:
A portion of that collection has been digitised and indexed for search. The searchable corpus currently covers four subject areas, drawn from primary literature — journal articles, monographs, field guides, husbandry manuals and reference works.
| Collection | Passages | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| Reptiles | 287,509 | Herpetology, field guides, systematics, husbandry |
| Anatomy | 142,348 | Comparative anatomy, histology, physiology |
| Animal Rights | 122,215 | Animal ethics, welfare, captivity, policy |
| Pangolin | 66,098 | Pangolin biology, trade, conservation, captive care |
Why we built it
A catalogue tells you what a library owns. It does not tell you what the library knows. A researcher asking “how many young do pangolins bear?” or “which snakes range along Panama's Caribbean versant?” would otherwise need to know which of 2,000 volumes to open, and where in it to look.
Ask Darwin searches the text of the collection directly and returns the relevant passages, each attributed to its source document and page. Every claim in an answer is traceable to a specific place in a specific work — so findings can be verified, quoted and cited properly.
How access works
This tool serves The Biodiversity Group's community of nonprofits and researchers. It supports the organisation's mission of protecting Life Overlooked — the species that receive the least attention and the least funding.
The library operates through direct outreach. If you need a work we hold, we can send you the pertinent material. If we don't hold it, tell us — there's a chance we can get it for you.
On fair use. The Biodiversity Group's position, as stated on its library page, is that fair use provisions allow it to send researchers and conservationists materials pertinent to its mission. This tool is intended to support that use: locating relevant passages for research and conservation work, with attribution to the source.
Nothing here is a legal opinion, and fair use is assessed case by case on the specific facts of a use. Researchers remain responsible for how they use material they receive, and for citing sources properly in published work. If you intend to reproduce substantial portions of a copyrighted work, seek permission from the rightsholder.
Terms of access. Access is granted to named partners under a short written agreement, settled before an account is issued. The agreement covers four points:
- Named individuals. Access is personal to the people named in the agreement. Credentials are not shared, and an account does not transfer to a colleague or successor.
- Research purpose. Material is provided for non-commercial research and conservation work.
- No redistribution. Material received is not passed on, republished, uploaded, or otherwise made available to anyone outside the agreement.
- No derivative distribution. Material is not used to build or publish a derived product — a database, a reproduction, a training corpus, or a competing service.
These conditions sit alongside the fair use position above rather than replacing it. Partners remain responsible for their own use of anything they receive.
Using it well
Ask questions, not keywords
Search combines meaning-based retrieval with exact keyword matching, so full questions work better than bare terms. “What do pangolins eat and how do they find prey?” outperforms “pangolin diet”.
Check the sources
Every answer lists the passages it drew on, with document, page, and — where the source is a field guide — the species the account belongs to. Open them. The answer is a summary; the passage is the evidence.
Absence of an answer is information too
If the collection doesn't cover something, Ask Darwin says so rather than guessing. That is a deliberate choice: an honest “not in the corpus” is more useful to a researcher than a confident invention.
Expect some digitisation noise
Text was extracted from scanned and born-digital PDFs, and some passages carry extraction artefacts — split words, garbled characters, dropped accents. Where a quotation matters, check it against the source.
Contribute to the library
The Biodiversity Group accepts book donations, and can provide a tax-deductible receipt on request. Volumes can be sent to:
The Biodiversity Group
12690 W Cactus View Ln
Tucson, AZ 85743
Requests, donations and questions: business@biodiversitygroup.org
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