The Digital Archive is an ongoing project to digitise all the BSBI’s publications and make them available freely to everyone. The project is entirely voluntary, and we would welcome offers of help with scanning or provision of electronic versions of publications.

If there is a paper that you would like us to scan, please make a request.

BSBI News is the newsletter of the BSBI. It is not peer-reviewed, it’s just a collection of letters sent in by members, but it contains many articles of interest to botanists. We have scanned most issues since it started in 1971, but some are still missing from our collection.

New! Cumulative Index of issues 1-110, compiled by Gwynn Ellis.

>> Cumulative Index (pdf 5.76 MB)

Watsonia

Watsonia was the journal of the BSBI from 1949 till 2010, and it has now been replaced by the New Journal of Botany.

As a service to botany, we make the whole of Watsonia available on-line to anyone who wants to read it (unfortunately, if you want to read NJB you will have to subscribe.)

Visitors are welcome to download papers for their own purposes, but the copyright remains with the BSBI and they may not be reproduced for distribution or sale without permission.

To find the paper you want, you can download the index to Watsonia (only covers vols 1-24) produced by Chris Boon, the honorary indexer.

>> Watsonia Index (pdf 577kb)

>> Watsonia Index (Excel 714kb)

Literature Searches

On the BSBI Database you can search for botanical literature by genus. It is fairly comprehensive for publications on British & Irish plants in the second half of the 20th century.

Simpson’s Index

Douglas Simpson’s comprehensive listing of sources of botanical information relating to the British Isles is now a scarce and valuable tome. It was scanned and digitized by Tim Rich at the National Museum of Wales, and is made available here as a download. Abbrevations have been expanded to make it more readable, and Dr Rich would welcome feedback and corrections.

Simpson, N.D. 1960 A Bibliographical Index of the British Flora. Privately printed, Bournemouth. Digitized and expanded by  T.C.G. Rich, 2004.

>>> pdf 7.19 MB

Proceedings, BSBI Recorder and the Welsh, Irish and Scottish newsletters of the BSBI are also increasingly available on this archive. Scroll down the menu on the left of this page to see what is there.