The Gift of Time: Celebrating Our Collections Volunteers

This June's "Treasure of the Month" celebrates arguably the Society's greatest asset: the small army of dedicated volunteers - past and present - who donate their time in service of our wonderful collections. With a wealth of subject expertise and professional skills, they play a crucial role in the life of the Society, and much of our work would not be possible without them. As we mark National Volunteer Week, we would like to pause to recognise their important and longstanding contributions, and pay tribute to their industry, generosity, and resolve. The short profiles collected here hope to illuminate the many and varied tasks our current volunteers perform among our several departments and disciplines, and perhaps inspire others to join their ranks. 

Amita Mehta 

Amita has been volunteering with us since August 2024 and has worked on a number of different cataloguing projects during that time. These include Indexes for the Council Minutes (Ref: DA/GOV/4/3/2/2) and General Minutes (Ref: DA/ENG/2/9), enabling these core records to be searchable for the first time; as well as more recently listing the beautiful pattern plates of William Swainson (Ref: SWA), which he produced for his publication ‘Zoological Illustrations’ (1820-1833).

Emily O'Connor 

Emily first came to the Society in May 2025 for a two-week cataloguing placement as part of her UCL postgraduate course in Archives and Records Management. She undertook a project working on the 5 volumes of sketches of William Keble Martin (Ref: MAR), which he used to produce his well-known publication, ‘Concise British Flora in Colour’ (1965). Emily kindly offered to come in after her placement finished to finish this project, and she is with us one day a week.

Alex Milne 

Alex will be a familiar face to many as our former fixed-term Project Archivist who was responsible for cataloguing our Domestic Archive (Ref: DA) as well as the Nature Conservation Archives (Ref: IUCN, NIC, FIT, CFN). Despite working full-time as the Archivist at Shakespeare’s Globe, she has kindly been remote volunteering with us since August 2025, focusing on transcribing entries from our Present Books (Ref: DA/COL/2/PB), an incredibly useful project which was started by our former long-standing volunteer David Pescod. 

Cary Phillips 

Cary started volunteering with us in September 2025 and has helped to complete a number of different projects, including the Indexes for the Council Minutes (Ref: DA/GOV/4/3/2/2), listings in the archive of John Charles Sawer (MS/478), as well as inserts in the travel journals of John Christopher Willis (Ref: WIL). We would also like to congratulate Cary on being accepted on to the Archives and Records Management course at UCL, which she will start in September!

Hazel Marsden

Hazel is one of the Linnean's longest-standing supporters. Her husband, Dr John Marsden, was the Society's Executive Secretary (forerunner to our modern CEO) from 1989-2004, and Hazel continues to generously give of her time to benefit the library and archives. Specifically, Hazel meticulously counts and records the library's item fetching slips, paying particular attention to the age of the material requested.

Sheila Meredith

Sheila is one of the Society's longest serving volunteers, and is a retired librarian from our neighbours at the Geological Society. Sheila is a fabulous and meticulous cataloguer, and has done sterling work on numerous metadata and retrospective cataloguing projects. Her recent work includes cataloguing the private library of Alfred Russell Wallace, and improvements to our sprawling index of author names (with over 9,000 entries amended to date!).

Louis Szemalikowski

Louis is our book reshelving volunteer; a vital task in any library, but one often neglected by hardpressed librarians! Louis has done amazing work to reduce the size of our shelving backlog, meaning items can be returned quickly to circulation for use by our readers.

John Abbott 

John is another of the Society's longest-serving volunteers, and used to work as a conservator at The National Archives. He has been with us for eight years and has conserved more than 90 collections, inlcuding the entirety of the Society Papers collections, which encompasses some beautiful artwork on papers. You can see him doing a live conservation demonstration in one of our Linnean Lens events. 

Much of the work of the Collections team would be infinitely harder without our panel of Honorary Curators. In particular, the curators charged with responsibility for the biological specimens are essential in fielding external enquiries and DNA sampling requests, bringing sensitivity and expertise to the care and use of this material. We're also indebted to our Honorary Archivist, who acts as the team's institutional memory, and our Curator of Artefacts who safeguards the Society's object collections.

Jacek Wajer

Jacek is a botanist and senior curator in the division of Algae, Fungi and Plants at the Natural History Museum, London. He is in charge of the Linnaean Plant Name Typification Project, which makes him an ideal collaborator. Jacek looks after our two herbaria at the Linnean Society: that of Carl Linnaeus and of James Edward Smith. 

Ollie Crimmen

Ollie recently retired from the Natural History Museum and is now a Scientific Associate at the NHM, after working for decades as Curator of Fish. He is our Honorary Curator for Zoology (Fish and Shells). He recently hosted a fascinating Linnean Lens on our fish collections. He was also featured in a Treasure of the Month article at his retirement from the NHM in 2023. 

Suzanne Ryder

Suzanne also works at the Natural History Museum as Senior Curator of the Hymenoptera collections, and is our Honorary Curator of Entomology, responsible for our insect collections. She also has a professional interest in Integrated Pest Management (IPM), has given IPM training to staff at the Linnean Society, and works with our Conservator to make sure our collections stay pest free.

Glenn Benson

Glenn has worked for most of his career at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and is our Honorary Curator of Artefacts. He is passionate about bringing these under-appreciated objects to wider attention, and has written numerous contributions to our Treasure of the Month series, and contributed to one Linnean Lens. His current work focusses on cataloguing our artefacts, especially our large collection  of medals. He has also helped out at various events over the years, in particular during the Open House festival. 

Gina Douglas

Gina will be another face familiar to many, having served as Librarian of the Linnean Society from 1981 to 2007. As Honorary Archivist, she listed many of the Society's archives, enabling the cataloguing work that has been ongoing for the last 15 years. Gina is in effect the Society's "memory", and is a good person to turn to on tricky enquiries relating to the Society's history. The refrain "Ask Gina!" is often to be heard in the Collections team office!