Our Reprint Collection includes material from the 1880s onwards. There is a wide geographic coverage in many languages.
Article offprints and other diverse grey literature were collected from the earliest days of the Department of Ichthyology at Rhodes University (1946). Margaret Crampton, Librarian at what became the JLB Smith Institute of Ichthyology (1968) initiated in 1983 a computerised bibliographic information system on fishes, based on these reprints and other library material.
This evolved into the Fishlit database, now incorporated into Fish, Fisheries and Aquatic Biodiversity Worldwide (FFAB) an electronic information resource which is an aggregation of 19 bibliographic databases from around the world.
FFAB offers comprehensive information for researchers specialising in ichthyology, fisheries, aquaculture, and aquatic and marine biology. It incidentally serves as a catalogue to much ofthe margaret Smith Library book and journal holdings.
Complementary database Waters and Oceans Worldwide (WOW) offers comprehensive information for researchers specialising in all aspects of water research. The database collection has two million records and wide international coverage.
Margaret Smith Library at SAIAB continues to contribute to the databases by providing material for indexing, especially grey literature, defined as not being published commercially -- often neither widely available nor easy to find.
Jacques Pellegrin (1873--1944) was a French zoologist at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris. From 1897, Pellegrin served as préparateur at the museum, and in 1908 was named as an assistant director.
He became sub-director of the museum in 1937, as the chairperson of herpetology and ichthyology.
As a result of his extensive fieldwork, Pellegrin published over 600 scientific books and articles and discovered around 350 new species. He named a number of fishes from the family Cichlidae.
He has the following species named in his honour: