From Plant Press, Vol. 3, No. 1, January 2000.
By Robert A. DeFilipps
Indeed, Ruth F. Schallert, the Botany Branch librarian at the National Museum of Natural History, has been the custodian of a cherished departmental Ferrari for years. The valuable object in question is, however, not a luxury model 1996 F355 Spider Convertible valued at $124,000, nor even a red-and-black 1991 Testarossa worth $77,500, although the library’s prize is also of Italian origin. The item is actually a book about citrus fruit by Giovanni Battista Ferrari, published in Rome in 1646, entitled Hesperides; it is the oldest book in the Botany Library. In Greek mythology the Hesperides were three maidens who guarded the Golden Apples sought by Hercules. The identity of the classical golden “apples” is now thought to be the orange (Citrus sinensis), and a further link to the Hesperides is found in the botanical term for the thick-skinned citrus fruit: “hesperidium.” Two of the Hesperidean maidens, Aegle and Hesperis (or Hesperethusa), became namesakes for rutaceous genera: one genus contains Aegle marmelos, whose common name is “golden apple”; the other genus, Hesperethusa, is now a synonym of Naringi; the third nymph, Erythea, is commemorated in a palm genus synonymized with Brahea.
Giovanni Ferrari’s Hesperides, which contains some of the earliest illustrations of the orangeries that were once in vogue for growing citrus, was, like many of the rare books in the Botany Library, an early gift. Among the donors who helped build the collections were prominent botanists such as Captain John Donnell Smith of Baltimore, who gave 1,600 bound volumes on Central American systematic botany in 1905; the renowned agrostologists Albert Spear Hitchcock and Mary Agnes Chase, who gave 1,500 volumes on grasses in 1928; and Floyd Alonzo McClure (bamboos), E. Yale Dawson (algae) and W. Andrew Archer (inventor of “Archer’s Solution” used for mounting plant specimens in many herbaria). The total number of volumes in the Botany Library is now approximately 42,500. Is every one of them worth reading? Truman Capote’s reaction to Jack Kerouac’s work was: “It isn’t writing at all – it’s typing,” a critique that could extend, depending on individual bias, to some holdings in any library.
Whether the patron is a scholar who makes daily visits to the incoming literature, or the variety who seems to frequent the library once every Ice Age, Schallert is available to share her knowledge with everyone, staff and visitors alike. Her background is extensive. A native of western Wisconsin, she did undergraduate work at Luther College, Decorah, Iowa and received her professional librarian degree from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Since her first job, in the Art Library of the University of Iowa, Schallert’s career has encompassed three government libraries: the Pacific Salmon Investigations library of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Seattle, Washington; the Naval Oceanographic Office library in Washington, D.C.; and, since 1966, the National Museum of Natural History, largely as Botany Branch librarian, with a brief part-time stint covering the Entomology Branch library. Schallert, an avid reader who is adept at both reference inquiries and library collections management, is a member of the American Library Association, the Special Libraries Association, the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries, and the Society for the History of Natural History. Her daughter, Karla Farrall, has been a stalwart volunteer in the library for many years.
The Botany Branch Library is one link in an extensive Natural History Museum network of departmental libraries of varying sizes, such as the Anthropology, Birds, Entomology, Fishes, Invertebrate Zoology, Mammals, Minerals, Mollusks, Vertebrate Paleontology, and Reptile libraries, as well as the Natural History branch (for general science and ecology). The Horticulture library, located in the Arts and Industries Building, might be called a sister-library that contains much cognate material of interest to botanists, and vice-versa. Some overlapping is to be expected: Linnaeana is held in many branch libraries besides Botany, separated according to the animal groups that Carl Linnaeus covered. Another overlap, the varied publications classified as “Ethnobotany,” is distributed among the Botany, Anthropology, African Art and Horticulture libraries, sometimes with copies lodged at the STRI (Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute) library in Panama. Additionally, in the Botany Department itself are several “extension” subsets of accessible literature, library-style accumulations of books and journals on ferns, lichens, mosses, diatoms, algae and biogeography, which also serve the needs of researchers.
One salient feature of the Botany Branch Library is its large assemblage of field notebooks, mostly made by collectors associated with the Institution and other branches of the federal government. The variety of people represented in this unique repository is suggested by the collection notebooks of : Joseph F. Rock (1884-1962), botanical explorer for the U.S. Department of Agriculture who collected in Thailand and China in the 1920’s and wrote “The Chaulmoogra Tree…Survey Conducted in Siam, Burma, Assam, and Bengal” (1922); George R. Vasey (1822-1893), curator of the U.S. National Herbarium, who collected in California in 1880 and wrote "Grasses of the Pacific Slope” (1892); Frank H. Knowlton (1860-1926), paleobotanist with the U.S. Geological Survey who collected in Colorado and Wyoming in 1896 and posthumously published the “Flora of the Denver and Associated Formations of Colorado” (1930); and Erik L. Ekman (1883-1931), Swedish botanist and explorer whose Haiti collections of 1917 were published by I. Urban as “Plantae Haitenses Novae vel Rariores” (1921).
The Botany Library is now operating at nearly full capacity, and due to crowded conditions some books are starting to be “shelved” on the floor, though they can be avoided by doing a sideways “crab-walk” in the narrower rows. Meanwhile, the literature of botany is burgeoning daily. The current explosion of new journals alone is exemplified by the following titles selected at random from those first published in the 1990’s, and provided with one-word names curiously reminiscent of plant genera: Arnaldoa (from Trujillo, Peru, first issue 1991, not to be confused with Arnoldia); Bocconea (Palermo, 1991); Gesneriana (Sarasota, 1995); Pabstia (Carangola, Brazil, 1991); Rojasiana (Asuncion, Paraguay, 1995); Sandakania (Sabah, Malaysia, 1992); Thaiszia (Slovakia, 1991); and Wulfenia (Klagenfurt, Austria, 1992).
Numerous original publications have emanated from the staff of the Department of Botany and the U.S. National Herbarium over the years, and the practice continues to the present day. The series entitled Smithsonian Contributions to Botany began as Number 1 in 1969 with Dan H. Nicolson’s revision of the aroid genus Aglaonema, and is currently up to Number 89 (1999), a classification of the American Vernonieae (Asteraceae) by Harold Robinson. Of longer lineage is the series entitled Contributions from the United States National Herbarium, which began in 1890, was discontinued in 1974, and is now revived for the foreseeable future, beginning with the year 2000 (Volume 39). The earlier series of “Contr. U.S. Nat. Herb.” included many classical studies such as: “Plant Life of Alabama” by C. Mohr (vol. 6); “Useful Plants of Guam” by W.E. Safford (vol. 9); “Flora of New Mexico” by E.O. Wooton and P.C. Standley (vol. 19); and “Trees and Shrubs of Mexico” by P.C. Standley (vol. 23).
Published by the Department of Botany, the resumed Contributions from the United States National Herbarium will be issued at irregular intervals, and Vol. 39: 1-128 (2000) is a “Catalogue of New World Grasses (Poaceae): I. Subfamily Anomochlooideae, Bambusoideae, Ehrhartoideae, and Pharoideae”, by E.J. Judziewicz, R.J. Soreng, G. Davidse, P.M. Peterson (Smithsonian curator), T.S. Filgueiras, and F.O. Zuloaga (see related notice in this issue). Coping with the library’s shelving space, budgetary, and acquisition requirements are but a few of the issues now being addressed, and electronic cybermethods will play a part in the research, archiving, storage, selection criteria, information gathering, and educational output of the library system in the museum. The Smithsonian Institution Libraries homepage URL is: http://www.sil.si.edu, from which information on special collections, databases, electronic journals, online catalogs, services and programs can be accessed.
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