Looking backward to move forward: Enhancing metadata in scientific collections through interdisciplinary collaboration

Summary Societal Impact Statement Early modern herbaria house important and useful data on historic environments. However, their contents are often inhospitable to scientific use. Despite this challenge, once their contents have been deciphered, such specimens present novel research opportunities. Reviewing historical herbaria through interdisciplinary approaches enhances the quality of metadata available about the specimens contained in these collections. Moreover, the establishment of long‐term interdisciplinary research partnerships facilitates the survival of herbaria. Approaching these collections through an interdisciplinary lens also presents new ways of acknowledging and tackling legacies of colonialism in the natural sciences, by foregrounding the conditions associated with their creation. Summary Natural science collections, such as herbaria, are becoming incorporated into environmental and cultural research studies. However, specimens created before 1930 (historical) are often difficult to interpret given unstandardized and inconsistent metadata recording practices. This has resulted in historical specimens, especially those created before 1753 (pre‐Linnaean), remaining largely absent from international research databases. This paper uses a subset of specimens from the pre‐Linnaean herbarium of Charles du Bois (bap.1658–1740), held in Oxford University Herbaria, as a case study to demonstrate how historical research techniques increase and enhance the quality of recorded geospatial, temporal and nomenclatural metadata associated with historic specimens. Treating the herbarium as both a historic and scientific object and pairing the specimens it contains with corresponding archival records and printed texts provides essential context on provenance, identity and use that is rarely accessible through typical scientific approaches. Examining early modern herbaria using historical analysis and interdisciplinary collaboration reveals even the most complex collections to be extensive archives of long‐term baseline environmental and cultural data, drawing new attention to these overlooked collections.