American Museum of Natural History Library

This week's post is about a library visit by the Library & Information Science Student Association. A former officer and recent graduate of the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers directed me to their pictures and provided some details about their visit to the American Museum of Natural History Library in New York, NY.

The library at the American Museum of Natural History was established with the founding of the museum in 1869. This library is one of the largest natural history libraries in the world. Among the collections, the library also maintains the astronomy collection from the Hayden Planetarium, which was transferred in 1997.

The website is worth a perusal if you don't have the opportunity to check this library out in person. The Congo Expedition of 1909-1015 is very well done with multimedia t presentations, impressive gallery with QuickTime videos and images of 3D visuals and high resolution display, and well presented access to the transcripts of the introduction. The Darwin Manuscript Project with a cleverly called Darbase is also worth a look. Check this this link for the list of digital collections. To whet you appetite for an in person visit, browse their catalog online.

The Flickr page from the Rutgers LISSA visit give some great perspective of the behind the scenes. These images were clipped from the Flickr page and link to the original Flickr files.