The Libraries exhibition, Picturing Words: The Power of Book Illustration is currently on view at the National Museum of American History. The exhibition features beautifully illustrated books from the collection more »
Smithsonian Libraries and Archives / Unbound
Mollusca marina Originally uploaded by Smithsonian Libraries Wilhelm Dunker, Mollusca marina . . . . Cassel :Fischer,1858-1870. View the entire volume through the Biodiversity Heritage Library:http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/41322 —Erin Clements Rushing
The Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology is celebrating its reopening today with a small event and presentation by the new Head of Special Collections, Lilla Vekerdy. more »
Smithsonian Libraries staffers regularly speak at meetings and conferences. Expert staff talk on many aspects of the work done at Smithsonian Libraries. A small sampling of such presentations are now more »
For this year’s annual orchid exhibit, which celebrates Charles Darwin’s 200th Birthday, the Smithsonian Institution Libraries (SIL) has played a small, but pivotal role. In the middle of the exhibit more »
The Smithsonian Research Bibliography has collected citations for over 1600 Smithsonian-authored publications during the 2008 calendar year. Smithsonian Institution Library staff collect and edit this publication data which is of more »
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:
