Royal Geographical Society

Today we went to the Royal Geographical Society!

The Royal Geographical Society was founded in 1830 as the Geographical Society of London. The goal of this society was to collect and disseminate geographical information. To further this end, the Royal Geographical Society needed to train members to conduct survey work. The society's formal collections started when the society began developing a collection of instruments for loan.

The Royal Geographical Society's history can be divided into four eras. Beginning in the 1840s, the first era was an era of Arctic exploration and the search for the Northwest Passage. (As a Canadian, I was delighted by this inclusion of "local" history!) The second era, from the 1850s to the 1880s, was defined by the search for the source of the Nile River. The third, in the 1890s, was an era of Antarctic exploration. Finally, the last phase of major exploration was the quest to summit Mount Everest in the twentieth century. The Royal Geographical Society's library collections includes material from all four eras of exploration. This ephemera presents unique storage requirements and it was very interesting to see how the society's librarians handled these concerns.

Documents and ephemera from the Royal Geographical Society's collections

For more information about the Royal Geographical Society's collections, see the full website at https://www.rgs.org/about/our-collections/