The best institutional libraries for malacology are:

The Natural History Museum, London
Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
Harvard University
Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris

These are all excellent libraries, but if you use the criterion "in the
same building as the collections", the first two are the best. For example,
at Harvard University much of the mollusk literature is in the Museum of
Comparative Zoology (or directly in the mollusk department, but the Geology
Department library has much of the literature on fossil mollusks, some
material is in the Herbarium library, and Widener (the main library) has
another subset of material, such as the older journals that cover multiple
fields of inquiry.

To my knowledge, the best private malacological libraries in the United
States belong to:

Richard Johnson, Massachusetts
Richard Petit, South Carolina
Florence Fearrington, New York

Gary

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Gary Rosenberg, Ph.D.                     [log in to unmask]
Malacology & Invertebrate Paleontology    gopher://erato.acnatsci.org
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