Virginia Academy of Science Records,

The Virginia Academy of Science Archives includes VAS publications dating from 1939-present. These include such in-house works as Review of the First Ten Years of the Research Committee (1939) and Announcement and a Challenge (1946?) as well as the Future ( 1950). The Academy has also published periodicals throughout its history. Claytonia was the first VAS journal (1934-39), followed by the Virginia Journal of Science (1940-43) and the Virginia Journal of Science, New Series (1950-present) (VJS). The Journal often focuses on special topics such as the issue which was devoted to the 1964 Virginia Symposium on Human Resources (held during the annual VAS conference); "Early Virginia," articles on scientific and cultural development in Virginia, was especially reprinted for the 350th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown in 1957; and in 1969 the VJS carried a series of articles on Virginia’s Dismal Swamp area. The Publications Committee records show that the Dismal Swamp series was the culmination of the work of many Academy members who had originally hoped for a separate work to be published like the James River Basin study. The Flora Committee of the Botany Section also periodically publishes a newsletter which became known as Jeffersonia in 1980; the Archives contain only scattered issues (11) from 1969-70, 1980. The Academy Archives also has copies of directories, brochures, and membership fliers which the VAS has published since about 1946.

The VAS Archives also includes manuscript and published versions of various Academy histories; especially interesting are the early versions by Ivey Foreman Lewis (first VAS president) and E. C. L. Miller. The Academy Archives contains quite extensive records of the work of Isabel Boggs and George Jeffers to coordinate the efforts of members to record the Academy’s past as well as the resulting master’s thesis of Harry J. Staggers, History of the Virginia Academy of Science, 1925-1927 (College of William and Mary, 1966). This history of the VAS appeared in the Winter 1968 issue of the Virginia Journal of Science and in Spring 1973 the Journal carried the more recent VAS history, 1948-1972, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Virginia Academy of Science charter.

The Academy Archives also includes correspondence, report, and minutes of section and of ad hoc and standing committees, annual financial statements, photographs and clippings, by-laws, and constitutions, records of special projects such as the visiting scientists program (supported by National Science Foundation grants), the Virginia Institute for Scientific Research and the Virginia Museum of Science.