About the project

This project has been made possible with help from Sara Lind, an intern from Sweden, and master’s student in Digital Services: Culture, Information and Communication (Library and Information Science, Boras Hogskola, Sweden). The text is written by volunteer Laura Scott Sellers. The main goal is to show glimpses of the Arboretum Library Rare Book Collection. Instead of digitizing entire books, images have been selected from different sources. Plant images are native to Mediterranean Climate Areas. You can find many of the plants in the garden. If you want to know the source of the image, click on the image or imageslider on the webpage and you will be transferred to Flickr where all necessary metadata (information about the image) can be found.

Main goal

The idea of presenting images in this way is to show that the Arboretum Library is connected to the Arboretum and the specific plants in it. Botanical illustrators have captured the essence of the plants over a hundred years ago. We can see the same plants in the Arboretum. Visitors of the Arboretum will now have the opportunity to look at rare botanical illustrations as they walk in the garden, while viewing the same plant in real time. To view the images you can use the Google Maps-tour. This project showcases the Arboretum Library collections and makes the public more aware of the library as a public place, where the bulk of the collections are in publicly available stacks. 

Technical specifications

The images are digitally captured with as much authenticity as possible, but corrections can have been made (removing dots or dirt) afterwards. The images have been cropped. There are also different capturing methods due to technical challenges at certain times, but most images have been scanned with Canon CanoScan 8800F. On the About the books page, you will see links to entire works.

Plant names

The plant’s names are mostly, directly copied from the source. If the name has changed over time it will usually be noted in the metadata. For those plants also found in the Arboretum, see the Plants in the garden page. All the plants portrayed in the images are from plant families that can be found in the Arboretum. Please note that the plant location in the Arboretum could change. 

Usage and copyright

The Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden scanned these images.  If you would like to use a scanned image, please contact Arboretum Librarian, Susan Eubank at Susan.Eubank@Arboretum.org.