National Sporting Library & Museum

The National Sporting Library & Museum in Middleburg, VA is seeking applications for the John H. Daniels Fellowship. The fellowship supports researchers-in-residence to study and use the collections for research into "a topic exploring the intersection of field sports with the evolution of conservation." Check out the Fellowship brochure for more information. The application deadline is March 1, 2013.

The National Sporting Library & Museum was founded in 1954 and the collections contain over 24,000 works of art and books on field and equestrian sports. The collection boasts items dating back to the 15th century. "The National Sporting Library and Museum is dedicated to preserving and sharing the literature, art and culture of equestrian, angling and field sports." There is an online catalog although it appears you'll need a log in to access it. You can contact the library to find out about access. The manuscript and archive collections contain scrapbooks, papers, photographs and research. Finding aids are available online. The library and museum are both open to the public and free of admission. If unable to visit in person, reference services are available. However, research is limited to 30 minutes per request. If you are curious about the library and collections, read the resource brochures available on the website, or like them on Facebook and check out some of the photos.

San Diego Zoo Library

Zoos have libraries. Go figure. I discovered this bit of information recently when I saw a job posting for an Associate Director of Library Services at the San Diego Zoo Global Library. The position closed to applications on October 11th, however here is the link to the job posting for anyone interested, and this is a link to a .pdf I've uploaded to Google Docs for posterity. The existence of libraries in zoos had never occurred to me. Then I realized, of course zoos have libraries. Zoos need access to veterinary collections for animal care, biological research, zoo history, current practice in animal care, to name a few needs.

I spent some time on the San Diego Zoo's library website and was impressed with the resources available. Check out these Fact Sheets. They are HTML pages that cover a breadth of topics. I dig the hippopotamus photo.


The zoo library has over 11,000 books and 400+ journal titles. There are archives and rare books, as well as general reference services and information. It looks like a great library resource. I borrowed some photos from the website to give you a look. Click the photos to visit the library home page.

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.

NOAA Western Regional Center Libraries

The Student Chapter of the Special Library Association at University of Washington (SLA-UW) hosts 'library crawls' each quarter for students of the Information School. The crawl takes students to two or three special libraries or collections in the Seattle area to introduce them to the variety of opportunities available. Students meet with librarians at the site, tour the collections and discover special libraries. The most recent library crawl hosted by SLA-UW visited the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Western Regional Center. Two SLA-UW officers submitted pictures and notes from the tour for this week's post. A special thank to Ann Pool for the text, and Violet Fox for the photos. You can access the Flickr stream for additional images from their crawl.
____________________________________

SLA-UW’s latest library crawl on May 9th took us to two of the three National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) libraries in Seattle: the NOAA Seattle Regional Libraryand the National Marine Mammal Laboratory (NMML) Library, both located in Sand Point.(The third is the Northwest and Alaska Fisheries Science Centers Library in Montlake.) Sixteen students attended this tour led by Brian Voss, the NOAA library director and a UW MLIS graduate.

Brian’s undergraduate background is in zoology and conservation ecology. He then went into NOAA’s fisheries observer program for a couple of winters before ending up in library school. During that time he worked in the Natural Sciences Library and for the Gates Foundation. He did a directed field work (DFW) at the Marine Mammal library and then went right to NOAA after receiving his MLIS. Brian was most interested in the tech classes, and said that the best ones taught concepts that are used regardless of changes in technology.

The three libraries serve the Western region offices. The NOAA library focuses on physical oceanography and atmospheric science. The primary use of the NOAA library is journal subscriptions to support research. Some nautical charts have been digitized but there are usability issues with viewing them online. The library also supports some email reference with the public and non-NOAA-affiliated social scientists. NOAA is now partnering with the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) on a pilot program to create a digital repository; this was prompted by documents from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Sonja Kromann, another UW MLIS grad, directs the NMML library. Its walls are lined with file cabinets containing articles reprinted from print journals the library didn’t subscribe to. Articles are no longer added to the files as periodicals are now available online, but the existing articles are still only indexed in the card catalog. The library also contains a collection of theses and archives, including the Fur Seal Archive which was Brian’s DFW project.

If solo librarianship or scientific libraries sounds interesting, you might want to consider a DFW at NOAA. Brian has worked with many DFW students in the past and has a couple of project ideas, including cataloging and inventorying the regional libraries’ online subscriptions, depending on your interests. After the tour we walked down to the Sound Garden sculpture located on NOAA's grounds and then enjoyed happy hour at the Monkey Pub.