In March 2020, in response to the Coronavirus outbreak, the RBGE Library, Archives and Photography staff, along with most of our colleagues, found ourselves working remotely from home. As well as leaving behind the collections that we manage we also found ourselves having to say a temporary goodbye to “our other team” – our incredible group of regular Library, Archives and Photography volunteers.

While we’re closed we asked our volunteers if they would share their thoughts and experiences of volunteering with us via blog posts. The idea was to try and provide us with a way of being together until we can all actually meet up again. It also seemed like a good opportunity for us to recognise and record the amazing work that all of our volunteers have done over the last few years.

Fortunately, many of our volunteers have very kindly agreed to write something and we’re now going to share these via this series of blog posts over the next few weeks. Each post features our volunteers in their own words (unedited!) and so get yourself a cup of tea and a slice of cake, sit back and enjoy…