The State Library is an excellent source of scientific information. For many years the Library has purchased publications to support the heavy demand in this area. The collection includes:
The collection is particularly strong in areas of concern to State government staff. For example, subjects of interest to staffs of the Biological, Geological and Anthropological Surveys of the State Museum and the research units of the Department of Environmental Conservation are given emphasis. Examples of special publications acquired to support their work are: Plant Taxonomic Literature, a core collection of the rarer basic works of the 18th and 19th centuries; the Decade of North American Geology reference set; and the Pesticide Product Information on Microfiche.
The collection of scientific serials is strong, with complete back files of many major scientific journals, such as Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London from 1665 and Comptes Rendus Hebdomedaires des Seances of the Academie des Sciences, Paris from 1835.
Proceedings of the meetings of many scientific groups are collected, particularly those in series.
While more emphasis is put on serial publications than on books in science, the monographic collection is extensive.
A special microform collection of early works, Landmarks of Science I, includes monographic works from the 16th through 19th centuries.
The Reference Index collection includes complete sets of Chemical Abstracts, Biological Abstracts, and Physics Abstracts; Science Citation Index from 1956 to the present; and more than 200 additional indexing publications related to science.
The Reference collection has such major general scientific reference works as the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, the Encyclopedia of Physical Science and Technology, Landolt Bornstein Numerical Data and Functional Relationships in Science and Technology and the International Critical Tables. It also has major reference works in the various disciplines of science, such as chemistry and physics.
Biographical resources and bibliographic guides to the science literature can be found in the Reference collection.