Cataloging and Contextualizing the World's Largest Known Collection of Printed Works by Charles Darwin

FAIN: PW-50520-10

American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia, PA 19106-3309)
Martin L. Levitt (Project Director: July 2009 to August 2012)

The cataloging of over 4,500 monographs comprising multiple editions and foreign language translations of the works of Charles Darwin.

In 2007, the APS Library, home to the largest collection of Charles Darwin manuscripts in North America, received what may be the most comprehensive collection of the printed works of Charles Darwin in the world. Donated by James W. Valentine, Prof. Emeritus of Integrative Biology at U.C. Berkeley, the Valentine/Darwin Collection is a lens through which scholars will be able to analyze the spread of Darwin's ideas as they were transmitted to both Western and Eastern cultures. It consists of more than 4,500 volumes, with original copies of nearly every edition and variation of all of Darwin's works in more than 20 languages, from his day to the present. The collection will be catalogued, conserved, uploaded to the APS OPAC, contextualized online by essays written by leading Darwin scholars, and disseminated through professional publications and postings as well as links to various online Darwin resources.