About Kew's Library Information Services team

Find out how Kew's Library Information Services team can help with your questions and curiosities about the world's plant life, plant artefacts and other plant uses such as medicine.

Kew's Library Information Services team.

Kew's Library Information Services team comprises four members, Craig Brough (Information Services Librarian), Marie Humphries, Lizbeth Gale and Tracy Wells. The kind of things that the team deals with include:

requests to use library material and providing responses to general enquiries,
supplying library material for visitors to enjoy and producing copies of this in both paper and digital form,
providing guidance to visitors on how to use the Library Catalogue, on what we have in our collections, and also on what is available in other libraries and on the web.

Many people see Kew as being synonymous with horticulture, but it is actually the case that our library collections are richer in material on wild plants in their natural habitats and the explorers who brought them to Europe. We also hold materials related to ethnobotany (the cultural and economic value of plants) and medicinal botany.

So, if you are visiting another part of the world and are interested in its flora, we may be able to give you an idea of what you might find there. Or, if you discover an interesting object made from plant fibre or wood and wish to know more, we may have this documented. If you are interested in how plants have been used in medicine, we can help here to. To begin with, ePIC can help, part of Kew's Databases & Publications page.

To get in touch, please email: library@kew.org or telephone +44 20 8332 5414.