Beatrice "Bee" Naish (1924 - 2013) was one of the four founders of Seven Ponds Nature Center, along with her husband Don Naish and Rip and Patty Schemm.  Bee's involvement was more than just providing the resources used to create the nature center, but rather as a passionate and active participant in developing Seven Ponds into what it represents today. She was an avid naturalist, birder, Assistant Naturalist, and one of the developers of the nature center's natural science library and cataloging system. She served as the center's volunteer librarian during her years here, and took pride in introducing new people to the library. Upon her passing, the nature center renamed the library in her honor, as well as establishing "The Bee Hive", a section of the library devoted to children's learning books and a cozy place for them to participate in story time or curl up with a good book.

The library is an outstanding resource for natural science research, and is open to the public for casual browsing or serious study. Please note: Only members of Seven Ponds receive lending privileges. The library is a private library unaffiliated with public library systems. To access our online database, please continue reading below.

TinyCat is here! Next time you visit, ask at the front desk about getting your member library card!  Anyone may explore TinyCat, but only members may borrow.

What is TinyCat? For the past year or so, library volunteers Griffin Barkdoll, Bob Kelly, and Marianna Fitzgerald have been working on creating an online, automated catalog for the Bee Naish Memorial Library collections. TinyCat is the brainchild of a company called LibraryThing out of Portland, Maine. LibraryThing (similar to Goodreads) is a website and app that lets you build a digital catalog of your books, among other features.

Our TinyCat is an experiment in improving access and promoting the books, new and older, in the library that Bee Naish started in the 1970’s and nurtured for many years. With this first version, TinyCat offers the ability to search all the elementary and junior books as well as a limited number of recent acquisitions in adult nature studies. Tackling the larger collection of adult titles is the next step.

Along with improved access to our library collection, a very important benefit of an online catalog is the permanent digital record it provides, a safe repository of our library collections and, if needed in the future, easy conversion to a different automated system.

Use the link below to access TinyCat, or the QR code for smartphone access.

There are lots of things that make Seven Ponds special, but one thing that makes us truly unique is our Bee Naish Memorial Library. This little gem of a library is full of nature books for all ages. For the last few years, we have been in the process of updating our collection: re-homing out-of-date books, archiving the books we couldn’t part with, and digitizing our cataloging system to something more useable and modern. Also, we have been slowly adding more books to our collection. That is where your help is needed! If you would like to contribute to our wonderful library, consider our Buy-A-Book campaign. For $25.00 per book, you can help us fill our library with more up-to-date books, replace much loved books, or help us find the next nature adventure in a book. Click the link below to contribute!