The society

The society was started in 2011 by six people who met at a plant meeting in a market hall and found that they were all photographing the same kinds of paper. It has no paid staff. It runs on a rota, a ledger and a shared set of working methods, which are set out on their own pages.

Roles

Cataloguer

Keeps the ledger of labels and indexes, and checks every reference number before a file is named.

Scanning rota

Four to six people who take turns at the copy stand, usually on Saturday mornings.

Treasurer

Keeps the storage budget, which pays for drives and for the second site where the third copy is kept.

Secretary

Writes the minutes of the spring and autumn meetings and keeps the list of decisions taken at them.

Membership and meetings

The society meets twice a year, in spring and autumn. Membership is agreed at the spring meeting, and each decision is minuted. Members are expected to take part in the rota for at least four Saturdays a year, but the rota is flexible and most people do more.

The rooms above a bakery are the only fixed place the society has. The copy stand, the lamps and the drives are kept there. Nothing is left in the rooms overnight except the cabinet, and the cabinet is locked.

The archive grew from the two cabinets given to the society in 2012 and 2016. Its scope has stayed close to them: herbarium sheets from the lowland fens and river meadows, and printed seed lists from the nurseries that supplied the same gardens.