Smithsonian Libraries

Peter S. Pallas and His Curious Cats

The scientific names assigned to animals often have intriguing origins, which can be revealed by books in the Smithsonian Institution Libraries' collections. The Pallas's Cat of central Asia, for instance, is named after German naturalist Peter Simon Pallas (1741-1811), the first person to publish a detailed description of the animal. Although he was not fully aware that the curious creatures he had seen during his travels were a new species, Pallas's account and his accompanying illustration were definitive enough to establish the foundation for the scientific record. Pallas spent much of his life in Russia, where he conducted expeditions in search of new and unusual animals and plants. In his account, Travels through the southern provinces of the Russian Empire in the years 1793 and 1794 (originally published in German in 1799-1801), he speculated that the mysterious felines known today as the Pallas's Cat (Felis manul) were the half-wild offspring of a local nobleman's pet:

The Botanist's Desire: Botanica Magnifica Redux

Back in May I posted a story about the exhibition of Botanica Magnifica in the Smithsonian Libraries' exhibition cases in the National Museum of Natural History. Well, in this month's Fine Books & Collections Magazine, Botanical Magnifica is featured in the cover story, "The Botanist’s Desire" by Jonathan Shipley (No. 34, July/August 2008).

In addition to a number of reproductions from the work, the article describes the process used by photographer Jonathan Singer in creating the work. Smithsonian botany curator John Kress also discusses the importance of the work.

Smithsonian Contributions series now available online!

The Smithsonian has a long and rich history of research and scientific publication. As part of an overall plan for digitization of the collections, the Smithsonian Libraries has tackled the rich and varied output of Smithsonian scholarly publications.

We're please to announce today that the Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press and the Smithsonian Institution Libraries have completed the digitization of legacy volumes of the Smithsonian Contributions Series. PDFs are available online at http://www.sil.si.edu/smithsoniancontributions/.

This is the single largest digitization project to date to be completed by the Smithsonian of legacy print collections. It includes 1,072 volumes (more than 107,000 pages) of Smithsonian research in a wide range of subject areas.

All publications are free to users around the world!

The following Series are now available as high-resolution PDFs:

• Smithsonian Annals of Flight (1964-1974)
• Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology (1965-present)
• Smithsonian Contributions to Astrophysics (1956-1974)
• Smithsonian Contributions to Botany (1969-present)
• Smithsonian Contributions to Folklife Studies (1980-1990)
• Smithsonian Contributions to History and Technology (1969-present; formerly Smithsonian Studies in History and Technology)
• Smithsonian Contributions to the Earth Sciences (1969-2002)
• Smithsonian Contributions to the Marine Sciences (1977-present)
• Smithsonian Contributions to Paleobiology (1969-present)
• Smithsonian Contributions to Zoology (1969-present)
• Smithsonian Studies in Air and Space (1977-1990)

Additional Smithsonian publication series are currently being scanned and will be available in the coming months.

For more information about the Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, visit their website.

- Martin Kalfatovic

The Library of James Smithson on LibraryThing

Thanks to Jeremy Dibbell, SI Libraries own Suzanne Pilsk, and the folks at LibraryThing, we've now added most (113 out of just over 120) of the remaining known books from library of James Smithson, the founder of the Smithsonian Institution.

One of the great things about LibraryThing is the ability to compare libraries. Other famous libraries on LibraryThing include those of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Samuel Johnson. A quick glance shows us that Smithson shared 4 titles with Jefferson, and one each with Johnson and Adams.

Take at look at Smithson's LibraryThing library. But also be sure to visit the Smithsonian Libraries website, the Galaxy of Knowledge, to learn more about the collection and to see a number of images from the library that include Smithson's annotations: Smithson's Library.

Leslie K. Overstreet, the Smithsonian Libraries Curator of Natural-History  Rare Books, writes of the Smithson Library:

James Smithson (c.1765-1829), an 18th-century gentleman of science, included his library with his bequest to the United States, and those books now reside in the vault of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries’ Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Library of Natural History.     The collection consists of 115 titles, primarily scientific monographs and journal articles, but also history and memoirs, political pamphlets, travel books and museum guides, and a few household items like cookbooks.

To learn more about James Smithson, take a look at the recently published, The Lost World of James Smithson: Science, Revolution and the Birth of the Smithsonian by Heather Ewing (2007).

Image at above:
André Jacques Garnerin
Air ballon & parachute; a circumstantial account of the three last aërial voyages made by M. Garnerin, viz. from Vauxhall Gardens, accompanied by Madame Garnerin and Mr. Glassford, on Tuesday, August 5, 1802, [1802]
http://www.sil.si.edu/ImageGalaxy/imagegalaxy_imageDetail.cfm?id_image=8483

Charles Darwin

This portrait of Charles Darwin is from the online collection, "Scientific Identity: Portraits from the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology" (view collection)

The scientific portrait collection in the Dibner Library was assembled by Bern Dibner. The images formed a fine research complement to the thousands of scientific books and manuscripts in the library he founded, the Burndy Library. Bern Dibner obtained most of the portraits during the 1940s from print dealers in Boston, London, and Paris. By 1950 he had about two thousand images and arranged them into ten scientific subdivisions: Botany, Chemistry, Electricity, Geology, Mathematics, Medicine, Philosophy, Physics, Technology, and Zoology.