New journals available in Science Gossip: Let’s celebrate by classifying all of the data, old and new!

The Science Gossip team recently uploaded five new journals that were established and edited by William Jackson Hooker*, founding director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, and one of the most important botanists of the nineteenth century. These include:

Botany Miscellany (1830–1833), Journal of Botany: Being a Second Series of the Botanical Miscellany (1834–1842), London Journal of Botany (1842–1848) and Hooker’s Journal of Botany and Kew Garden Miscellany (1849–1857). The Journal of the Quekett Microscopical Club (1868 to present) is the longest running ‘amateur’ journal for microscopical societies. The society, which was established in 1865, came directly out of the community developed through the natural history periodical Science Gossip – with founding members including the publisher Robert Hardwicke and editor and mycologist Mordecai Cubitt Cooke.

In addition to the new journals, there are approximately 24,000 pages still to be classified between the five original journals: Gardeners Magazine and Register or Rural & Domestic Improvement (23% complete), Gardener’s Chronicle (2% complete), Hardwicke’s Science Gossip (77% complete), the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London (86% complete), Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine (96% complete).

With your help we can identify the wealth of illustrations locked in these wonderful Victorian natural history journals, and make them available for researchers and any interested parties for years to come!

** Free access to the Hooker article was provided by The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, a research and publishing project of Oxford University and Oxford University Press. It is available until 30 November, 2015.