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NOAA Library 1
Wed Oct 13, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
Bryan: I can see by sitting here that it’s a library, so what’s the big deal?
Doria: Because we’re really unique. We are the repository of the nation’s scientific
heritage, going back to when the Coast Survey started in 1807. And we have
documents even prior to that.
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook, and that was Doria Grimes, librarian at
the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Central Library in Silver
Spring, Md. According to her colleague, NOAA Information Specialist Skip Theberge, it
is a big place—one floor of approximately 40,000 square feet.
Skip: This particular library has about 1.5 million documents that reside in the library.
The age of there documents ranges from 1485—our oldest book in the library—up to
yesterday, basically. We cover all continents; we cover all oceans. The range of
material here goes from the surface of the sun to the bottom of the sea, which basically
covers the realm of NOAA.
Doria: We are the largest, most comprehensive meteorological collection in the
Western Hemisphere.
Skip: You find treasures every day here. You find the history of various aspects of
science that just don’t exist anywhere else.
Doria: We have a special collections room which is a humidity-controlled,
climate-controlled environment. Roughly 6,000 documents and counting. What we use
for U.S. imprints—the cutoff date—pre-Civil War, prior to 1800, foreign imprint. So we
have some original Isaac Newton’s, we have the Hippocrates Latin translation—1485.
We have the original Kepler. We have some Aristotle, again, Latin translation… 1560.
So the history of science, for the U.S., and its affect on the U.S. is within this room.
Back to the Library tomorrow. The Weather Notebook is a program of the Mount
Washington Observatory, funded by Subaru of America.
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