This dataset provides an overview of the bound volumes and exsiccatae preserved in the botanical collections of the Natural History Museum. For each of the 1320 items accounted for, the title and compiler of the item are provided, together with their Natural History Museum registration number, the subdepartment to which they belong and the curator responsible for the item and to whom enquiries should be addressed.

The Museum’s bound volumes and exsiccatae are held in seven of the botanical subdepartments, six of which have a taxonomic and or geographical focus: Algae, Bryophytes, Lichens and Slime Moulds, Pteridophytes, British and Irish Seed Plants, General Herbarium (i.e. Rest of the World Seed Plants). The other subdepartment is ‘Historical Collections’. This comprises items that are, for the most part, pre-Linnean (although with some exceptions) and among the specimens preserved within the volumes in this subdepartment are representatives of all groups traditionally preserved in herbaria, together with some zoological and entomological specimens.

The use of bound volumes as a method for the preservation of botanical specimens has a long history. The de facto foundation collection of the Natural History Museum’s herbarium is the herbarium of Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753), and it comprises 263 volumes that are enumerated in this dataset. The oldest specimens in the collection, collected around Lake Constance by J. Spiegler and dating from 1603, are similarly bound into one of the volumes accounted for here (BM013862141). The bound volumes included in this dataset represent over four hundred years of botanical collecting and span the 17th to 20th centuries.

Exsiccatae are sets of dried plant specimens made by one to many different collectors and distributed by an editor, typically accompanied by printed labels. They were often used as standards for comparison. For the most part, the exsiccatae described here are bound in volumes although some are on loose folios that are preserved as sets. Later exsiccatae were often distributed as loose specimens so that they could be more easily incorporated into collections as is the case at the Natural History Museum. Exsiccatae incorporated into the main collections are not described here; only those that have been maintained as distinct sets are listed.

A blog describing the dataset can be found here: https://naturalhistorymuseum.blog/2022/11/20/when-is-a-book-not-a-book-the-bound-volumes-and-exsiccatae-in-the-herbarium-at-the-natural-history-museum-curator-of-botany/

Wherever possible, the titles of exsiccatae given here follow titles given in IndExs – Index of Exsiccatae (http://indexs.botanischestaatssammlung.de/).