NCSU Libraries Focus Online

Volume 22 number 3 - Spring 2002

By Caroline Weaver, Special Collections

The Zeno P. Metcalf Collection is one of five major collections on insects housed in the NCSU Libraries' Special Collections Department. The other major collections are the Friedrich F. Tippmann Collection, the Clyde F. Smith Papers, the Maurice Hugh Farrier Papers, and the Entomology Department Drawing Collection. The history of these collections illustrates how NC State's Department of Entomology has contributed to the Libraries' success over the years and exemplifies the positive impact faculty can have on collections that relate to their fields of research. Entomology professor David A.Young informed the library that the Tippmann collection was for sale. Metcalf, Smith, and Farrier were all professors of entomology who donated their papers and research materials to the library. NC State faculty and students prepared the drawings in the Entomology Department Drawing Collection, which was curated by entomology professor James R. Baker.

The NCSU Libraries has long enjoyed the active support of the Department of Entomology, and two entomologists have received the NCSU Libraries Faculty Award: Maurice H. Farrier became the first Faculty Award winner in 1989, and Lewis L. Deitz received the award in 1999. Currently, Deitz and library staff are working on an Internet-accessible database for existing entomological literature between 1758 and 1955 about leafhoppers and treehoppers (Membracoidea) and related insects. Students working for the library have been digitizing and editing Zeno P. Metcalf's bibliography of literature on the auchenorrhynchous Homoptera and its associated geographic and topical indexes. The Metcalf project is funded by a National Science Foundation grant (National Science Foundation PEET Grant number 9978026), and, when completed, will be available through the library's Web site. In recent years, NC State faculty and students in entomology also raised funds to purchase French designer Eugene Alain Seguy's Insectes: Vingt Planches en Phototypie Coloriées au Patron Donnant Quatre-vingts Insectes et Seize Compositions Décoratives [Paris: Chartre et Van Buggenhoudt, ca. 1928]. The stunning beauty and colors of this publication's twenty hand-painted plates were created using the pochoir technique, a printing process that employs a series of stencils to lay down the colors. Further, entomology faculty have created an Entomological Special Collections Endowment to ensure that the Libraries can purchase additional items of significant scholarly value and thus maintain the exceptional level of entomological materials.

The connection between the Libraries and NCSU entomology faculty began with celebrated professor of entomology and zoology Zeno P. Metcalf, who taught at NC State from 1912 to 1956. He served as president of the Entomological Society of America in 1947 and as president of the Ecological Society of America in 1949. Metcalf published nine books and dozens of journal articles, but he is perhaps best known for his works Bibliography of the Homoptera (1942) and the forty-two-volume General Catalogue of the Homoptera of the World. Both works reflect the decades he spent compiling all known references to and studies on the homopteran suborder Auchenorrhyncha, of the class Insecta. He sought to create a comprehensive resource for entomologists studying Homoptera, collecting a body of literature that contained virtually every word published on Homoptera through 1955. This literature collection is now housed in the NCSU Libraries.

Clyde Smith's research on the family Aphididae of the order Homoptera complemented Metcalf's work, and the combined materials create the most comprehensive collection of literature on Homoptera in the world. Smith, who taught at NC State from 1939 to 1964, produced two major volumes, Bibliography of the Aphididae of the World (1972) and An Annotated List of Aphididae (Homoptera) of North America (1978).

The Maurice H. Farrier Collection of literature on mites (more than 1,400 published items), acquired in 1998, is a unique resource for acarology. It is unsurpassed for holdings on the order Mesostigmata, which includes nearly 300 genera and fifty-nine families. Farrier, who served as a research assistant in the Department of Entomology from 1950 to 1952 and again from 1954 to 1955, studied at NC State during the time professors Metcalf and Smith were at the university. Farrier earned a Ph.D. in entomology in 1955 and that same year became assistant professor in the department. He retired as a full professor in 1991.

Farrier's main topic of research focused on the Veigaiidae (Acarina). He wrote numerous articles for scholarly journals, news columns in various North Carolina newspapers, and other works. In March 1957 his A Revision of the Veigaiidae (Acarina) was published. Farrier and one of his students, Michael K. Hennessey, co-authored a taxonomic index on mites, Soil-Inhabiting and Free-Living Mesostigmata (Acari-Parasitiformes) from North America: An Annotated Checklist and Bibliography and Index (1993), the Systematic Revision of Thirty Species of Free-Living, Soil-Inhabiting Gamasine Mites (Acari: Mesostigmata) of North America (1988), and Mites of the Family Parasitidae (Acari: Mesostigmata) Inhabiting Forest Soils of North and South Carolina (1989).

These collections are augmented by the Tippmann collection, which David Young brought to the attention of the library. Young, who taught at NC State from 1957 to 1980, wrote a letter to Harlan C. Brown, then director of the university's library, informing him that an important personal library of entomological books was for sale. Its owner, a Viennese engineer and amateur entomologist, had earlier sold his collection of beetles to the Smithsonian. Tippman's collection of entomological literature includes many fine examples of pre-Linnean works, including a fourteenth-century woodcut plate from Konrad von Megenberg's Buch der Natur. It also includes the legendary tenth edition of Carolus Linnaeus's Systema Naturae, a book that established the use of binomial taxonomy in zoology. Many of the works in the Tippmann collection are European travel narratives spanning the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries and popular Victorian-era works on natural history and entomology. Researchers are regularly impressed by the inclusion of some of the earliest and rarest entomological periodicals.

In July 2001 Baker transferred the Entomology Department Drawing Collection to Special Collections. This collection includes drawings of insects prepared by faculty and students at the university. These and other materials purchased by and donated to the NCSU Libraries continue to attract researchers from around the world. The dedication of faculty from the Department of Entomology to developing a literature base for research has helped to establish the NCSU Libraries as one of the world's leading repositories for entomological works.