Royal Horticultural Society project wins volunteering award for work to uncover hidden horticultural history
The Archives and Records Association has announced that the Digital Dig project by the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has won the national ARA Archive Volunteering Award 2023.
The award is given each year to projects that demonstrate how archives have supported volunteers in the previous 12 months. This year’s winning project, Digital Dig, was set up to help uncover and document hidden horticultural history through three volunteer projects. It centres on a rare and unique collection of more than 28,000 plant nursery catalogues representing over 2,000 individual nurseries, dating back to 1612. The Digital Dig volunteers have all created digital resources that will make the previously fairly inaccessible collection widely available to users online.
The project has three volunteering strands which each looked to attract differing target audiences:
• Transcribers – this attracted volunteers with an interest in horticulture that wanted to engage with RHS collections, develop digital skills and volunteer remotely.
• Geotaggers – specifically targeted to students and volunteers interested in remote micro-volunteering opportunities. This work appealed to those that had an interest in gardening, wanted experience of heritage work for career development, or who wanted to know more about the RHS collections.
• Digital Ambassadors – this involved two youth groups in areas that related to the nursery catalogue collection: The Museums Partnership Reading youth panel, Reading and students at The Urswick School, Hackney. The RHS specifically wanted to work with young people on a digital engagement project and capture their vi
