Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Miscellaneous Reports cataloguing & conservation project (360G-Wellcome-210445_Z_18_Z)

The project goals are to conserve and catalogue a series of 771 volumes, The Miscellaneous Reports, held in the Archives of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The Reports collate unique archive and printed material relating to the administration of the British colonial botanic gardens and stations during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They document the economic botany of these regions through correspondence with Kew, printed reports, newspaper articles, and illustrative material such as maps, photographs and sketches. Potential research themes include indigenous use of plants, medicinal use, history of science, environmental history, nutrition and health, anthropology, ethnography and agricultural history. The project aims to catalogue them into Kew's on-line Archive Catalogue. Other than a listing of the titles of the volumes, the collection is uncatalogued. Two conservators will rehouse and repair volumes so they can be safely handled. An archivist will be employed to catalogue the papers, including people, places, plant names and subjects, making this underused and unknown body of material accessible to the research community. The Wellcome Trust-funded Scoping Report (2015) identified that researchers were unaware of the collection or its contents, so making it accessible would enable primary research of a previously unknown resource to occur.