Rachael in the palm house at Kew, 2019

Following my traineeship, I began work as a Project Cataloguer working on the Georgian Papers Programme at the Royal Archives, which is a large-scale digitisation, cataloguing and research project making all the Royal Archives’ Georgian material freely accessible online. Here I catalogued papers of George IV to item level, supported researchers, and gained experience of digitisation workflows. This built on the cataloguing and palaeography experience I had developed at the Bodleian.

I then moved to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where I am currently in the middle of a two-year project cataloguing the Miscellaneous Reports Collection, a large collection of nineteenth and twentieth century material relating to global and colonial networks of economic botany. I am responsible for the cataloguing of this complex collection, which includes correspondence, printed reports, newspaper cuttings, photographs, illustrations, and even plant specimens. My role has included implementing new cataloguing and indexing protocols, using linked data to index botanical names, managing volunteers, and promoting the collection to researchers and the public through exhibitions, group visits, social media, talks, and academic events.

I really enjoyed my traineeship and am grateful for the brilliant opportunity it gave me to gain skills in a wide variety of archive work, which has given me a useful grounding for my career so far.

Rachel Gardner, Oct 2019