Dear AIS Discuss: Progress on the Iris Library in the Iris Encyclopedia continues. With the addition of the 60 Catalogs from Anne & Mike Lowe and some newer entries there are now 157 catalogs in the Library. They can be accessed easily by going to Catalogs in the Index of the left bar. If one wants to check on catalogs by nursery instead of by date one can look under Nurseries in the Index. This second route includes links to 400+ additional catalogs. But we have only scratched the surface.
I know there will be many more of the Lowe catalog collection coming, although I do not have a listing of what is on the way. But in the meantime you may be able to help me out. If we could get last yearâs catalogs and the previous few years we could continue to work on developing this archive. It dawned on me that current nurseries may have their own archive of their catalogs in pdf form or at least their printer may have these pdf files. If I could receive such files it would eliminate having to scan them in the future. Also very recent catalogs are under copyright and by offering them to the Encyclopedia Archive by the owner, the owners permission is implicit in their being displayed.
If you have a nursery or could help me alert smaller nurseries to this possibility I would be appreciative. It takes me a great deal of time integrating these catalogs into the Encyclopedia and not having to seek out each nursery personally could be a great help to me. It is a very worthwhile project to build this historic archive for future irisarians.
Since the Encyclopedia does not do advertising I feel it is not appropriate to accept current catalogs from which people can order. Correct me if I am wrong in that supposition. But Last years catalogs may still be in files tat could easily be converted to a pdf.