Is a freely accessible portal to historic botanical literature from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library. Botanicus is made possible through support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, W.M. Keck Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The problem: Digitizing, indexing, and annotating historical scientific literature is vital to future research in systematic botany, the science of the identification of plants. Like other natural history disciplines – but unlike the physical sciences – systematic botany is built upon and requires frequent reference to the literature of its past. To conduct carefully documented and authenticated research, botanists must spend weeks in library collections searching the published botanical literature for data to develop a new project or substantiate their recent observations. Comprehensive collections of botanical literature are only available in a handful of libraries, all located in North American and Europe.
The solution: To improve access to scientific literature, we have created Botanicus, a freely accessible, Web-based encyclopedia of digitized historic botanical literature from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library. We have been digitizing materials from our library since 1995, focusing primarily on beautifully illustrated volumes from our rare book collection.
Botanicus, Missouri, Botanical Garden, 4344 Shaw Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63110, USA
Phone: +1(314) 577-5100
Library Phone: +1(314) 577-5100
Coordinates
4344 Shaw Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63110, USA
http://www.botanicus.org