The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has digitised a collection of scrapbooks kept by William T. Hornaday, the first director of WCS’s Bronx Zoo. Ten of the scrapbooks from The Hornaday Wildlife Conservation Scrapbook Collection are available for public viewing.
The Hornaday Wildlife Conservation Scrapbook Collection is a digital project of the Wildlife Conservation Society Archives which documents and preserves WCS’s storied history of saving wildlife and wild places since its inception in 1895 as the New York Zoological Society.
This website makes available ten of the fourteen scrapbooks that compose William T. Hornaday’s self-titled Scrapbook Collection on the History of the Wild Life Protection and Extermination. The remaining four scrapbooks have not been made available in digital format because they contain significant amounts of copyrighted material. Like many scrapbooks of this age, these books are very fragile and show signs of deterioration. Digitising does not preserve them, but it does allow for access to items with condition issues related to age. The website also provides a biography on Hornaday, as well as information about the collection and about the project to digitise the scrapbooks.
The pages appear online as they were found at the project’s start in 2012. Every effort was made to protect their condition during the digitisation process.
William T. Hornaday (1854−1937) was a première conservationist and passionate defender of wildlife. Hornaday was a pioneer in the early wildlife conservation movement in the United States. He was well known during his lifetime for his substantial roles in the worlds of zoos, natural history museums, and wildlife conservation. He chose the site for and worked on the design of the New York Zoological Park, known today as the Bronx Zoo, and served as its first director from the opening in 1899 until his retirement in 1929.
(Source: WCS press release, 07.04.2014)