The New York Botanical Garden Herbarium
The Herbarium of The New York Botanical Garden, now housed in the new 70,000 ft2 International Plant Science Center, is the country’s largest repository of plant specimens and is classified as a National Systematics Research Resource Center. One of the five largest herbaria in the world and the largest in the Western Hemisphere, it is a vast, actively managed, and intensively used collection of approximately 6,500,000 specimens of all plant and fungal groups. It contains about 125,000 type specimens and many historically significant specimens that predate the founding of the Garden in 1891. Because of its taxonomic, geographic, and historical richness, the Herbarium serves as a primary source of research materials for botanical investigations throughout the world. Virtually all major taxonomic revisions of plants of the Americas and parts of the Old World include examination of specimens deposited in the NYBG Herbarium. Last year, the Herbarium sent 50,000 specimens on loan and hosted 165 visitors.
The LuEsther T. Mertz Library of The New York Botanical Garden
With more than 1.25 million print and non-print items from the 12th to the 21st centuries, The LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden is considered one of the most important research collections in the world by the international botanical community. It contains 275,000 volumes of books and journals, 185 linear feet of microforms and nearly 11,500 serial titles. The library strives to collect comprehensively in systematic and floristic botany with a particular strength in the Western Hemisphere. Since the establishment of the Library a century ago, other major research and academic libraries in the New York metropolitan region have deferred to it for developing and maintaining collections of literature in botany, horticulture, landscape design and gardening history, making it the plant reference library of record in the metropolitan region. The library receives more than 1,000 serial titles annually from its active exchange program in more than 70 countries worldwide and adds some 1400 new book titles to its collections each year. The library provides reference and information services to commercial, scientific, academic and public users. Its online catalog known as CATALPA is available to search via the Internet as part of the Garden's website at http://librisc.nybg.org/screens/opacmenu.html.