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Library
The Garden's library provides visitors, staff, and members access to the accumulated knowledge contained in botanical and horticultural literature in print and electronic formats. This year, the Library Services department provided access to more than 900 online scholarly journals, a substantial increase over the previous year's total of 700. Library patrons also greatly increased their usage of online media. With on-site computer access to these journals, readers viewed over 4,900 pages, almost twice as many as last year.
BBG also continues to acquire, catalog, preserve, and make accessible traditional book and serial collections. The library added just over 1,000 titles in the past year, bringing the total number of volumes in the collection to more than 48,500. The number of visitors and information requests handled by Library Services during the year increased to over 8,000, due in large part to record visitation during the two days of the Garden's Sakura Matsuri celebration.
In the fall, the BBG Florilegium Society mounted its fifth public exhibition at BBG's Steinhardt Conservatory Gallery. The beauty of BBG's living collections was captured by 44 Florilegium Society artists working throughout the year. Artists invited to participate in this unique project are among the country's most celebrated and talented botanical artists. By year end, a total of more than 150 works of art in BBG's Florilegium Society Collection had been donated to BBG since the Society began its work in 2000.
In 2007, BBG received its first grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to support Drawing From Life: Maud H. Purdy and 90 Years of Women Artists at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, a fall 2007 exhibition and accompanying catalog that also received support from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). The exhibition featured the work of 14 botanical artists and was curated by the director of Library Services, who also wrote text for the catalog.
In January 2007, the Library purchased six exhibit cases, two of which now reside permanently outside the Gardener's Resource Center and will be used to showcase the collections and complement Garden events. Exhibitions so far include artwork by Dr. Peter K. Nelson and books and objects related to Japanese culture and flowering cherries, in conjunction with Hanami.
Beginning in 2001, BBG received grants from NYSCA to support the digitization of the library's visual collections: Louis Buhle glass plate negatives in 2001 and Maud H. Purdy paintings and sketchbooks in 2004. In early 2007, NYSCA and the Metropolitan New York Library Council awarded BBG major funding to create digital content based on a third virtually unknown but uniquely important non-book collection: the Elsie May Kittredge photographs of local flora. Library Services digitized 427 of the hand-colored lantern slides and 675 of the glass plate negatives created by Kittredge from 1908 to 1919, and began work toward making the collection available to the public on the Garden's website.