Sino-American Botanical Expeditions Papers

The 1980 Sino-American Botanical Expedition (SABE) was a watershed in Chinese plant exploration as it was the first time western botanists returned to China to collect plants since the Communist Revolution in 1949. As part of a larger project at the Arnold Arboretum Library, we are extracting all the materials from discrete collections to create a comprehensive collection on this expedition and the two subsequent expeditions in 1984 and 1986. For this project, the intern will take materials that have been identified in the discrete collections, and transfer them to the new collection, notate the changes in the discrete collections' finding aids, organize the materials using our existing format for expedition collections, perform item level cataloging of the collection in Archives Space to finalize a finding aid, and digitize materials as appropriate. This project supports a broader archival and curatorial initiative to increase the discoverability of our modern-era (post 1977) exploration archives.