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Collections Overviews - Science and Technology

Environmental and Earth Sciences

Scope

This overview focuses on the Library's collections in environmental science, which includes such varied and relevant subjects as air, land, and water pollution, solid waste management, biodiversity, endangered species, and tropical ecology, and its collections in the earth sciences, the latter including geology, paleontology and related topics.

Size

Approximately 60,000 titles in earth sciences have been identified in LC's general collections; this figure does not, of course, include special collections. Probably 30,000 titles relate to environmental science and its extensions, again, not including special collections.

General Research Strengths

The earth sciences collections have long and definable tradition at the Library, dating from the purchase by Congress of Thomas Jefferson's library. Among the massive holdings on geology, palaeontology and related topics in the general and special collections are extensive serials and federal government and state publications accumulated over the years. Successive agencies in the United States government and state legislatures have been prolific in authorizing the publication of literature central to the study of earth sciences in this country, and LC has been the beneficiary of deposits by these sources.

Because of constant book and serial acquisition since the early nineteenth-century, the benefit of the Smithsonian deposits in 1870 and afterwards, deposits by U.S. Government and state agencies, and the seeking out of special collections in various media, the Library's collections in the earth sciences are, as related to America, nearly equal to those of the U.S. Geological Survey. Our holdings in world earth sciences are very strong, especially in the areas of mineralogy, stratigraphy, and soft rock geology.

Environmental science, which began as the "conservation movement" in the nineteenth-century, originally had a literature which focused upon the saving of relatively large animal species from depletion by hunters, and the preservation of areas useful to humans from such factors as erosion. The Library's general collections well document this change from the conservation movement to the environmental movement, which is still so much an object of study that clear parameters have not yet been established.

The environment is a subject that knows no boundaries, and our collections, therefore, cover materials from all parts of the world, including those from third world countries, as well as in all languages. These collections also include major reference works, including statistical compilations, directories, abstracting and indexing services, technical reports, project memoranda, government studies, development reports, and encompasses subjects from environmental law and coastal zone management to appropriate technology.

Areas of Distinction

Prior to the Library's decision in the early 1970s not to pursue the papers of earth scientists so as not to compete with other Federal libraries and in order to build upon existing strengths, LC already had some major manuscript collections in the earth sciences, chiefly correspondence of F. V. Hayden, director of the U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories (1867- 1879) in the George P. Merrill collection; the papers of U.S. Geological Survey officers S. F. Emmons, W. J. McGee, George Becker and F. H. Newell; the papers of eminent palaeontologist John C. Merriam; and ancillary manuscript collections such as those of scientific administrators Alexander Dallas Bache and Lloyd V. Berkner ("father of the International Geophysical Year"); geophysicist Merle Tuve; and related papers, such as those of many government officials who participated in surveys, and overview of activities related to earth sciences.

The Prints and Photographs Division holds major documentary photographs and ancillary materials relating to the surveys of the American West and the Geography and Map Division has collections which are certainly secondary only to the Geological Survey's own, of the historical progression of the geological mapping of the United States. G&M also has many other charts and maps relating to the geological exploration of North America, from those of Lewis and Clark to date.

The Library's collections of materials relating to polar, arctic, and alpine research are very strong and support two ongoing bibliographies published by the Science and Technology Division: the Bibliography on Cold Regions Science and Technology and the Antarctic Bibliography. The Library retains in its collections microfiche copies of materials cited in these bibliographies. Although we have not added substantially to our special collections in the earth sciences, in the 1970s and 1980s we vigorously pursued the personal and professional papers of eminent environmentalists and persons in related fields, to augment already strong holdings. We hold the papers of pioneer conservationists Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt and William T. Hornaday, as well as those of more modern figures such as Barry Commoner, Joseph Wood Krutch, Floyd Tangier-Smith, Fairfield Osborn, and contemporaries Robert C. Cook (of the "population explosion") and Edward O. Wilson, proponent of biological diversity.

The Library has an excellent representative collection of the seminal rare books of geology, as well as many in the applied fields of paleontology, mining, and metallurgy. Among some of the more significant works collected are those of Agricola (16th- century) Hutton and Guettard (18th-century) and Cuvier and Lyell (19th-century).

Weaknesses/Exclusions

The Library decided early in the 1970s that it would not continue to seek the acquisition of special collection items in the earth sciences to avoid competition with other Federal libraries. The U.S. Geological Survey Library has the major special collection in the earth sciences, which we have not attempted to duplicate.

Last Update - October 1993