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About this site
In early April 1865 a small Club for working naturalists was founded in Etruria, in the heart of Stoke-on-Trent. This Club was the North Staffordshire Naturalists' Field Club, renamed in 1877 as the North Staffordshire Naturalists' Field Club and Archaeological Society (1865—2003). The Club accepted all interested people regardless of qualifications, gender or social class and was destined, within a decade of its founding, to become one of the largest and richest Field Clubs in the British Isles.
The Club was eventually wound up in 2003 (
1) or thereabouts, and its remaining funds helped to fund the publication of the sumptuous book
The Flora of Staffordshire.
2015 was the Club's 150th anniversary, and this seemed to me an appropriate year in which to undertake to begin an accurate and lightly annotated catalogue of its publications. It is mostly tedious work and has gone somewhat slowly. At the end of 2016 the site is still in "early alpha" version, but I am aiming at eventually making a comprehensive online catalogue that is both a 'finding aid' and a 'discounting aid' for researchers and historians. At December 2019 there is a rough-but-useful finding-aid up to 1898, and the site's pages are easy to navigate.
Please note that my approach may disappoint strict professional bibliographers, since my account of the contents of each early
Annual Report differs somewhat from its published Tables of Contents. In my page-by-page examination and listing of each issue's contents I usually omit mention of the Club's excursion reports where they no longer seem to be of any modern interest, while noting other items (such as plant lists, interesting asides, descriptions and sometimes whole papers) which did not merit inclusion in the printed table-of-contents. The coverage is at present a rather rough 'first pass', and will be polished to higher bibliographic standards over the coming years.
Web links to full-text scanned PDF versions of the Club's journals and books will be given where these are public. At some point in the future it should also be possible to upload high-quality scanned versions here.
1.
The Flora of Staffordshire, 2011, Update No. 1, February, 2012, p.2.