** Ed: This is the third introduction post of Libraries in Ohio, United States for IFLA WLIC 2016 conference. The Publications Team is grateful to The Harold Terry Clark Library of The Cleveland Museum of Natural History for their article contribution. **

Perched on the top floor of The Cleveland Museum of Natural History is a treasure trove of resources that reflect the Museum’s interests and ongoing research initiatives. The library collection numbers around 60,000 volumes, 20,000 of which are books. The bulk of the collection is a 40,000-volume periodical collection that includes over 3,000 individual titles and was built up over the years through a publications exchange program with institutions from around the world.

The Library primarily serves Museum staff, and the collection has been built to serve the research needs of the curators. There is also plenty of material available to other staff, such as historical items about the Museum for our marketing folks, richly illustrated books to help inspire the exhibit builders, and field guides to help our educators with their classroom work. Books and journals circulate to Museum staff only, but we also lend materials to other libraries via interlibrary loan. The Library is open to the public, but we recommend that visitors make an appointment, especially if they have research needs. That way, visitors can be sure to have relevant materials on hand and ready for use. We assist many students from area universities, such as Case Western Reserve University, Kent State University, Cleveland State University, Baldwin-Wallace, the University of Akron, and the Cleveland Institute of Art. We also welcome students of any age who are researching topics for science fair or other projects.

In addition to the regular holdings of books and periodicals, the Library has a 1,000-volume rare book collection that boasts some of the finest examples of illustrated books in the field of natural history, especially in the area of ornithology. For example, we have 42 volumes of works by John Gould, a British author and publisher who produced gorgeous books on birds and mammals from around the world. Gould is most famous for his five-volume work on hummingbirds, which feature hand-painted images that have been enhanced with gold and silver leaf to make the life-size birds really shimmer.

The jewel of the rare book collection is a first edition double-elephant folio Birds of America by John James Audubon. It is one of the finest copies in the world. In addition to its beautiful binding and brilliantly-colored plates, the Museum’s treasure has a very interesting provenance, or history of ownership. We do not know the original subscriber of the Museum’s set, but we do know that in the early 1850s it belonged to the Bronte family. The first volume of the five-volume Ornithological Biography, the text that accompanies the plates, includes an inscription by the Reverend Patrick Bronte, father of the novelists Emily, Ann and Charlotte Bronte.

Why or when the Bronte family relinquished the Audubon set is unknown, but in 1901 the American poet Amy Lowell purchased the volumes from Quaritch, a bookseller in London. After Amy Lowell’s death in 1925, her Audubon collection was sold to Goodspeed, a Boston bookseller. John Sherwin, a Cleveland banker, purchased the set from Goodspeed in 1926. Sherwin died in 1934. In 1947, his son, John Sherwin, Jr., donated the Audubon set to the Museum in his father’s memory. Thanks to a generous gift from the Museum’s Women’s Committee, we are now able to house the Audubon set in a custom-made display case, replacing the original cabinet that was constructed in 1947. We just unveiled the new Audubon exhibit on April 24, 2014.

For more information about the Library and its special collections, please visit the website at https://www.cmnh.org/c-r/library

Contributed by Ms Wendy Wasman, Librarian & Archivist at The Harold Terry Clark Library of The Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

Posted by Justin Tan, Editor.