Special Collections: Manuscripts (Mineralogy Manuscripts)
Item
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Country
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GB
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Language of name of institution
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eng
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Contact information: postal address
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Cromwell Road, South Kensington, London SW7 5BD
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Contact information: phone number
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0044 020 7942 5460
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Contact information: email
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library@nhm.ac.uk
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Reference number
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SPECIAL COL. MSS
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Type of reference number
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Archival reference number
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Title (official language of the state)
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Special Collections: Manuscripts (Mineralogy Manuscripts)
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Language of title
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eng
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lat
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Creator / accumulator
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Natural History Museum
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Date note
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bulk: 18th century/19th century
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Language(s)
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eng
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Type of material
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Textual Material
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Scope and content
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The Mineralogy Manuscripts of the Special Collections of the Natural History Museum includes a manuscript of Emanuel Mendes da Costa's "An historical account of all the fossils as well native as extraneous found in England", 1735 (SPECIAL COL. MSS MEN).
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Administrative / Biographical history
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The British Museum in Bloomsbury, London, moved its natural history departments to the newly built British Museum (Natural History) in South Kensington in 1881. Very few library materials were transferred over to the new location – which became the Natural History Museum a year later - so the libraries had to be developed virtually from scratch.
The new library was founded by its first librarian, Bernard Barham Woodward (1853-1930), who had previously worked at the British Museum.
Initially, a general library was created to hold all works that were relevant to more than one department. Recognising the inextricable link between the Museum’s specimen collections and their associated literature, each science department also had its own independent collection of specialist literature, located closer to the scientists' working areas than the general library.
To keep track of the burgeoning collection, a central card catalogue was created. Between 1903 and 1940, the contents of the catalogue were published more widely under the title Catalogue of the Books, Manuscripts, Maps and Drawings. When Woodward retired in 1920, his successor, Basil H Soulsby (1864-1933), continued building the collections. Soulsby procured a number of obscure editions of Carl Linnaeus's work through the British Museum's Catalogue of the Works of Linnaeus project. Alexander Cockburn Townsend (1905-1964) took over from Soulsby in 1930 and evacuated most of the library's valuable items from London during World War II.
Following the death of Walter Rothschild in 1937, the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum (as it was then known), and most of its specimen and literature collections, passed into the hands of the Natural History Museum. Rothschild's entomology specimens and library materials were transferred to London in the late 1960s and incorporated into the South Kensington collections. In the early 1970s, the ornithology specimen collection from South Kensington was moved to Tring, accompanied by relevant library materials, which were added to the Tring Library collection.
In 1975, the Museum's libraries were unified as the Department of Library Services, under a central management team headed by librarian Maldwyn Jones Rowlands (1918-95).
In 2006, the Library and Archives became a founding member of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). In partnership with the Internet Archive, the BHL has already digitised millions of pages of taxonomic literature, representing tens of thousands of titles and over 150,000 volumes.
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(source: Natural History Museum website)
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Author of the description
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Carla Vieira, 2023
