The Rosarium Project will collect, highlight, digitally curate and bring to the Web historical primary sources about the genus Rosa. The project focuses on non-fiction materials written about the rose in English from the sixteenth century up to 1923. These resources will include books, pamphlets, ephemera, and articles from popular magazines, scholarly journals and newspapers. The digital texts—with their accompanying images, a rose glossary and a bibliography—will be fully searchable. Researchers will be able to browse the books and articles or search through them by keyword, author, title, subject, and other facets. Users will have freely available online access to historical documents about roses.

The principal researcher, a research librarian at the Phillips Memorial Library + Commons of Providence College, conceived the project as a way to collate, curate and provide easy access to everything written about the most revered flower in the garden. Hundreds upon hundreds of books and articles have been written about “the queen of flowers,” but these primary sources are scattered in library collections and online repositories.

This project will fill a need for its intended audience, which includes researchers in the fields of garden history and horticulture, as well as popular culture scholars interested in leisure activities and suburban life. It is also expected to be of great value to gardeners, particularly rosarians, interested in learning tricks and techniques used before modern fertilizers and pesticides, to those studying garden designs and styles of bygone eras, and to those wishing to identify hardy old roses as that may still be available from specialty rose nurseries.

The idea to create an online collection of materials on the rose sprang from a much earlier bibliographic project, which had been started and shelved in the 1990s. Back then, there were (and still are) only two bibliographies on the rose written in English. They are both severely outdated and incomplete.

In early 2015, the principal researcher rekindled her interest in doing research on what was written on the rose. She wanted to collect information about the rose into an easy to use and access format, but a printed bibliography was out of the question as printed bibliographies are now passé. The notion of merely compiling a simple bibliography and uploading it to the Internet, although potentially helpful to rosarians, was not adequately stimulating intellectually. Plus current technology provides opportunities that just can’t be passed up; a mildly tech-savvy librarian can now do amazing things with just a little training and the right software. A major skill set of the principal researcher involves database searching and database management, and the idea of creating a fully searchable online database of writing on the rose was an exciting intellectual challenge.