Member Institutions

Adler Planetarium

History of astronomy and space exploration

• One of the world’s largest collections of sundials and astrolabes
• Historical celestial atlases, works on instruments, and astronomical texts and tables
• A large collection of historical telescopes, including early examples
• Treatises on mathematics, optics, physics, astrology, geography, and navigation
   

American Institute of Physics

History of physics, astronomy, geophysics and allied fields

• Niels Bohr Library & Archives
• International Catalog of Sources for the History of Physics and Allied Sciences (ICOS)
• Oral histories
• Photos
• Digital collections
• Documentation research

American Philosophical Society

18th and 19th century natural history, evolutionary biology, genetics, quantum mechanics and cultural anthropology

• 13 million manuscript items, including papers of Benjamin Franklin and Charles Darwin and of Nobel Laureates Francis Peyton Rous, Salvador E. Luria and Barbara McClintock
• 350,000 volumes and bound journals, including first editions of Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia and Darwin's Origin of Species
• 250,000 images and thousands of hours of recorded sound

Chemical Heritage Foundation

History of chemistry and related sciences, technologies, and industries

• 150,000 books and journals dating back to the 15th century
• 6,000 rare books, including the noted Roy G. Neville Historical Chemical Library
• Over 5,200 linear feet of manuscripts, including institutional and corporate collections (including the Dow Company and Rohm & Haas historical archives) and the personal papers of Paul Flory, Carl Marvel, Alan MacDiarmid, Richard Smalley, Paul Lauterbur and many others
• 28,000 historical photographs of chemists, laboratories and instruments
• Historical artifacts, including over 700 chemical instruments and 90 chemistry sets
• Over 90 works of art and 200 prints of chemical subjects dating back to the 17th century
• More than 425 oral history interviews with leading figures in chemistry and related sciences, technologies, and industries
• 2,500 journal titles, dating from 1819
• Library Catalog

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

History of molecular biology, genetics, and biotechnology

• Genentech Center for the History of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology
• Archival collections of James D. Watson, Sydney Brenner, Barbara McClintock, Hermann Muller, Wally Gilbert, Charles Weissmann, and others
• Reprint collection assembled by Charles Davenport and Milislav Demerec totaling over 90,000 items
• Rare book collection assembled by Charles Davenport, Milislav Demerec, and amplified by gifts from Sydney Brenner, Elof Carlson and James Watson
• Photograph archive containing over 100,000 photographs of preeminent CSHL geneticists from 1890 to present when they attended meetings at Cold Spring Harbor
• CSHL international meetings and courses bring together more than 12,500 scientists each year from around the world to present and evaluate new data and ideas in biological research
• Abstracts from all CSHL scientific meetings covering the period from 1950 - present.

The College of Physicians of Philadelphia

Health sciences

• 340,000 books and bound journals, the oldest book dating from A.D. 1244
• 1 million manuscript items, including the papers of W. W. Keen and S. Weir Mitchell
• Mütter Museum of medical artifacts and specimens

Columbia University

Research university; library system with holdings in many areas.

• The David Eugene Smith collection of books and manuscripts on the history of mathematics, that include Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic/Persian materials and Smith's scientific instruments collection.
• Edwin H. Armstrong Papers
• Elizabeth Blackwell Papers (first female physician in the U.S.)
• Charles Chandler Papers
• Marie Curie Papers (came with papers of journalist Marie Mattingly Meloney, her U.S. sponsor)
• Robert Fulton (a small collection, but with some good information about his steamboats)
• George Pegram
• Michael Pupin Papers
• Otto Rank Papers
• Mary Lasker Papers (philanthropist whose foundation has sponsored much medical research)
• Large group of social work collections deal with nursing and public health, including:
• Lillian Wald Papers
• Community Service Society Papers (includes a large collection of photographs commissioned by CSS)
• Further Links of Interest:
• The Center for Science & Society
• Library Research Awards Program

Drexel University

Natural history, History of Women in Medicine, Women's Health, Medical Education, Homeopathy, Engineering and Tech Ed

• 250,000 titles, from works published in the 1500s to the present, in both print and electronic format at the Academy of Natural Sciences.
• Over one million archival items related to individuals related to the Academy of Natural Sciences, as well as expeditions from the last 200 years. These include letters, official documents, film, and photographs.
• Approximately 5,000 linear feet of correspondence, diaries, oral histories, rare books, photographs, objects and other materials related to the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania/Medical College of Pennsylvania and Hahnemann University.
• Over 500,000 books, journals, textbooks, and on-line resources in the library collections of Drexel University proper.
• 50 linear feet of archives of technical and industrial education, and of engineering and early technical institute records, part of approximately 2500 linear feet of Drexel University collections.

The collections of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, which include:

• 17 million plant and animal specimens, including the Lewis & Clark herbarium, Thomas Jefferson’s fossil collection (from the APS) and J. J. Audubon’s bird skins
• 250,000 manuscript items relating to the history of natural history
• 200,000 volumes on all aspects of natural history, with particular strengths in systematics, evolution, ecology, marine and freshwater biology, stratigraphy, comparative biochemistry, history of science, exploration and travel.

Approximately 5,000 linear feet of archival material documents the history of:

• Drexel University College of Medicine and its predecessor institutions, the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania/Medical College of Pennsylvania [WMC/MCP] and Hahnemann University.
• Women in medicine, internationally, evolving from WMCP's unique position as an all-female medical school
• Homeopathy, internationally, rooted in Hahnemann's founding as the first school for homeopathic medicine in the United States.
• over 500,000 books, journals, textbooks, and on-line resources in engineering, health sciences, business, information science, and design and media arts, as well as general science, humanities and social sciences
• 50 linear feet of archives of technical and industrial education, and of engineering and early technical institute records, part of approximately 2500 linear feet of Drexel University collections.

The Franklin Institute

Science museum

• Hands-on museum of science and technology
• Fels Planetarium
• Benjamin Franklin Collection, Wright Brothers Aeronautical Engineering Collection, and Fairmount Waterworks Collection
• Archives of Committee on Science and the Arts, with 3,800 Case Files from the early 1800s and documents from the Institute's Committee on Inventions

Hagley Museum and Library

Business and technology

• 37,000 linear feet of records
• Personal and business papers of the DuPont Company and family
• Records of the Pennsylvania Railroad and Bethlehem Steel
• 300,000 digitized items and 2 terabytes of electronic records and web archives
• 290,000 bound volumes
• 2 million images

History of Science Society

Professional society; history of science, technology and medicine

• world’s largest society dedicated to understanding science, technology, medicine, and their interactions with society in historical context
• produces Isis, the widest circulation journal in the history of science, and Osiris, an annual thematic volume devoted to single topics of wide interest to the history of science community
• maintains the Current Bibliography of the History of Science and its Cultural Influences (an HSS member benefit), an online bibliography of History of Science, Technology, and Medicine articles published world-wide
• the HSS Newsletter, published quarterly, provides job listings, conference announcements, and news of the Society, its members, their disciplines and the profession

The Library Company of Philadelphia

American history and culture and its European background from the 17th through the 19th centuries

• Papers and medical library of Benjamin Rush
• 500,000 bound volumes, including many early American imprints
• Helfand Collection of Proprietary Medical Pamphlets

Linda Hall Library

primary and secondary sources that document the sciences, technology, and engineering disciplines from the 15th century to the present

• History of science, technology, engineering, especially strong in natural history, astronomy, environmental and earth sciences, life sciences, physics, chemistry, aeronautics, infrastructure studies, Cold War sciences, and mathematics
• Over 500,000 monograph volumes and more than 48,000 journal titles
• Conference proceedings, reference works, government publications and technical reports, over 200,000 industrial standards, unpublished engineering society conference papers, and U.S. patents
• Acquired entire American Academy of Arts and Sciences Library in 1947
• Acquired entire Engineering Societies Library in 1995
• Over 10,000 rare books, including Rheticus’s Narratio Prima, Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, Hooke’s Micrographia, Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, and Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida & the Bahama Islands
• Digital collections provide access to nearly 250,000 digitized images of significant rare and fragile materials

New York Academy of Medicine

history of medicine

Strengths of the collection include:

• 16th-, 17th- and 18th- century Western medical texts
• medical Americana and collections related especially to the history of medicine in New York
• culinary collections
• pamphlets
• anatomical atlases and works by and about Andreas Vesalius
• surgery
• women’s medicine
• epidemic diseases
• herbals and medical botany
• public health documents
• works by William Harvey

Newberry Library

Cartography, book arts, renaissance studies, Native American studies, religion and science, environmental history

• John M. Wing collection on printing and books arts: 100,000 volumes of technical literature, periodicals, and histories of book arts; 600 linear feet of printing and publishing-related archives; 68,000 volumes of classified printing samples of every period
• history of cartography: 600,000 maps and thousands of travel books
• Edward Ayer collection on Native American history, including 17,000 primary source documents and 130,000 books
• long runs of European and American periodicals
• historical materials on polar regions
• Chicago-area and Midwestern history
• history of magic
• religion and science

Oregon State University

Research university; library system with holdings in many areas

• Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers
• Diverse nuclear history collections, including concentrations on nuclear weapons, testing, nuclear power, dosimetry, radiation safety, cultural responses, and nuclear sciences
• History of Atomic Energy Collection (over 5000 print volumes, ephemera, and images)
• 25,000 rare books, including concentrations in histories of chemistry, the biological sciences, physics, quantum mechanics, genetics, medicine, agricultural sciences and husbandry, botany, and natural history
• Over 700 manuscript and archival collections on diverse topics in the history of science, including natural resources in the Pacific Northwest, environmental history, brewing history, forestry, alternative medicine, chemistry, botany, genetics, and physics

Princeton University

Research university; library system with holdings in many areas

• 6 million printed volumes
• Subject libraries in astrophysics, biology, chemistry, engineering and geosciences
• 5 million manuscript items, including the papers of Edwin Grant Conklin, Harry Hammond Hess and David Todd Wilkinson

The Rockefeller Archive Center

Philanthropic support of science, technology and medicine in the twentieth- and twenty-first century

• records of the Rockefeller family and their wide-ranging philanthropic endeavors (including Rockefeller Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Rockefeller University)
• repository of materials from the Ford Foundation, the Population Council, the John A. Hartford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Commonwealth Fund
• personal papers of leaders of the philanthropic community, Nobel Prize laureates, and world-renowned investigators in science and medicine
• over 115 million pages of documents, over 900,000 photographs, 18,000 reels of microfilm, 6,000 films, and 6,000 maps and architectural drawings

Smithsonian Institution

history of science, technology, natural history, culture, art, design, and international expositions

• 2 million printed books, journals, and manuscripts
• Digital Library creates electronic versions of rare books and other distinctive collections, as well as exhibitions and specialized finding aids
• Special Collections Department libraries contain 50,000 rare and valuable volumes and 2,000 manuscript groups dating from the thirteenth to the early twentieth centuries
• world's fairs and international expositions collection, including publications documenting the fairs from 1851 to the twentieth century
• Alexander Graham Bell’s and Joseph Henry’s personal book collections
• the surviving volumes of James Smithson's personal library
• other rare book and special collections represent such diverse research interests as early aeronautics, European decorative arts and design, and Asian art

Society for the History of Technology

Professional society; history of technology 

• The society's quarterly journal, Technology and Culture, is published by the Johns Hopkins University Press
• Historical Perspectives on Technology, Society, and Culture, a booklet series published jointly with the American Historical Association
• Technology's Stories: Past and Present, an open-acess digital magazine featuring essays, blogs, book announcements from SHOT members and more
• An annual newsletter

University of Pennsylvania

Research university; library system with holdings in many areas

• 5.6 million printed volumes
• Subject libraries in chemistry, veterinary medicine, engineering, math/physics/astronomy and biomedicine
• 10,000 linear feet of manuscripts, including the Edgar Fahs Smith Collection in the History of Chemistry

University of Toronto

Research university; library system with holdings in many areas.

• The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, including 740,000 volumes and 4000 linear metres of manuscript holdings
• strengths in history of science and medicine, British, European, and Canadian literature, philosophy, theology, political science, Hebraica and Judaica, and the art history of the book
• Anatomia: Digitized collection in the history of science and medicine, including 92 individual titles printed between 1522 to 1867.
• The Discovery and Early Development of Insulin: over six thousand page images of original documents relating to the discovery and development of insulin, 1921-1925, including laboratory notebooks, charts, correspondence, writings, published papers, photographs, awards, clippings, scrapbooks, printed ephemera, and realia

The Wagner Free Institute of Science

Natural history and science education

• Natural history museum
• 45,000 printed volumes, special features of which are university and public school syllabi and publications from smaller, often defunct, scientific institutions
• 500 linear feet of manuscripts, including papers of Joseph Leidy, Edward Drinker Cope and William Berryman Scott

Yale University

Research university; library system with holdings in many areas.

The Yale University Library is one of the world’s leading research libraries and a highly valued partner in the teaching and research mission of Yale University and scholarly communities worldwide. It is committed to fostering intellectual growth by collecting, organizing, preserving, and providing access to a rich and unique record of human thought and creativity. One of the Library’s distinctive strengths is its rich spectrum of resources, which include more than 15 million volumes and information in all media, ranging from ancient papyri to early printed books to electronic databases. Housed in 15 libraries, including Sterling Memorial Library, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library and the new Center for Science and Social Science Information.