Institute of British Geographers

For some 60 years, the Institute of British Geographers (IBG) has been the United Kingdom's leading learned society for geographers. It was founded in 1933 and merged with the Royal Geographical Society in 1995.

Learned societies play several major roles in the production and diffusion of knowledge. To promote research, they organize conferences, publish journals, and fund projects; to promote their disciplines, they represent them in a range of arenas. Until the establishment of the IBG, academic geographers in the United Kingdom had no such organization. They were able to meet and publish through the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), the Geographical Association (GA), and the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA), but each of these had a much wider brief than just supporting academic ...