A trip to the Foyle Reading Room of The Royal Geographical Society (RGS) this morning marked the final program visit of our time in London. While it's sad to see our time coming to a close, it was lovely to spend the morning with Eugene Rae, the principal librarian of the reading room. I, unfortunately, did not bring my phone (ie. camera) into the room and so do not have photographs of this experience. Apologies for a text filled blog post!
On a large table in the reading room, Eugene laid out many documents and facsimiles from the RGS archive. Using these to illustrate his stories, he told us about some of the grander voyages undertaken by members of the society.
Using photographs of key players, maps highlighted with routes, and genuine artifacts he told us about the journey to find the Northwest Passage, the African expedition to find the root of the Nile River, the battle to be the first person at the South Pole, and the expedition to Everest's summit.
Each of the stories was captivating and made all the more so by seeing the personal effects of the explorers. I was fascinated by the sun visor brought back by a northern expedition team. Made out of wood, the visor has a brim and thin eye slits that limit the amount of light the wearer would see, thereby preventing snow-blindness. So smart! Another item that I found particularly noteworthy was the right boot of George Mallory, a Mount Everest climber who disappeared on the mountain in the 1950's. Mallory's perfectly preserved body was discovered by climbers in 1999, who took personal items including this boot to prove they found his remains. After a stint in America, his items were returned to one of his kin who donated the materials to the society. To me, each of the items and documents shown to us illustrated how daring and ground-breaking these expeditions were. That Eugene handled each piece with latex gloves and reverence demonstrated the uniqueness of each piece.
Today, the RGS focuses its efforts on education and supporting geographers. They formerly had a museum that put many of the items in their collection on display but for space reasons and a shifting priority toward education they shut it down. Now their collection is held in the archive and library, a space that is near bursting. For this reason, they do not seek out new acquisitions and take only things that can be owned by them outright and are related to their history. Eugene did not speak directly about their library or processes, but I did overhear from his conversation with a classmate that the digitization of hundreds of years of card catalogues was completed by outsourcing the work.
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| By Steve Cadman [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons |
Using photographs of key players, maps highlighted with routes, and genuine artifacts he told us about the journey to find the Northwest Passage, the African expedition to find the root of the Nile River, the battle to be the first person at the South Pole, and the expedition to Everest's summit.
Each of the stories was captivating and made all the more so by seeing the personal effects of the explorers. I was fascinated by the sun visor brought back by a northern expedition team. Made out of wood, the visor has a brim and thin eye slits that limit the amount of light the wearer would see, thereby preventing snow-blindness. So smart! Another item that I found particularly noteworthy was the right boot of George Mallory, a Mount Everest climber who disappeared on the mountain in the 1950's. Mallory's perfectly preserved body was discovered by climbers in 1999, who took personal items including this boot to prove they found his remains. After a stint in America, his items were returned to one of his kin who donated the materials to the society. To me, each of the items and documents shown to us illustrated how daring and ground-breaking these expeditions were. That Eugene handled each piece with latex gloves and reverence demonstrated the uniqueness of each piece.
Today, the RGS focuses its efforts on education and supporting geographers. They formerly had a museum that put many of the items in their collection on display but for space reasons and a shifting priority toward education they shut it down. Now their collection is held in the archive and library, a space that is near bursting. For this reason, they do not seek out new acquisitions and take only things that can be owned by them outright and are related to their history. Eugene did not speak directly about their library or processes, but I did overhear from his conversation with a classmate that the digitization of hundreds of years of card catalogues was completed by outsourcing the work.
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