"Dr. Livingstone, I presume"

Thursday 7/11: The Royal Geographical Society

Founded in 1830 as the Geographical Society of London, the Royal Geographical Society (or, RGS as I will call it throughout this post) aims to promote the science of geography through exploration, teaching, and academic study; the latter now being the primary focus.  We visited the reading room, which opened in 2004, with the principal librarian, Eugene, as our guide.

The RGS has over 2 million items in its collections, and half of that is just maps.  They have about 2,000 atlases with the oldest dating to 1490.  A large quantity of images is also held in the collections, mainly photos that document the history of British exploration.  About 15,000 images have been digitized, both for the sake of user access, but also to protect some of the most fragile items.  Books only make up a relatively small part of the collection at approximately 250,000 volumes, 150,000 of which are books and the rest bound periodicals.  The remainder of the collection consists of archives, fellowship certificates (which help with genealogy), and museum objects, or artifacts.

Interestingly, RGS does not use any classification scheme, but rather a shelf marker system that labels each item with its location on a particular shelf.  They do, however, enter everything into their database which provides a central access point to the collections.  We've seen this a lot in the places we have visited so far, and I find it interesting that this is more the case than not, as opposed to the US where similar institutions will generally always have some sort of classification system in place.

Eugene had laid out the reading room table with oodles of goodies for us to look at, and as he went around the table explaining the objects, he also gave us a (much needed) lesson in British geographical history.  Below are some pictures of the objects he showed us, including the hats that Stanley and Livingstone were wearing when they met, Darwin's pocket sextant from his voyage on the Beagle, a petrified biscuit and piece of chocolate, Shackleton's balaclava, Mallory's boot, and some beautiful hand-sketched maps from some of these famous explorers.  These items have found a safe, and permanent, home at the RGS, where they will be well-preserved and taken care of by this team of professionals.