Tuesday 17 April 2012

World Book Night

World Bok Night is coming up on the 23rd of April. To celebrate, Library staff at Tremough will be giving away FREE copies of books! On this literary theme, I have been busy putting together a display to promote our Patrick Gale archive, which will be up tomorrow in the group study area of the library and will contain handwritten drafts of novels, a fillm treatment, and other exciting treats.

For those of you unfamiliar with Patrick Gale, he is best known as an author, and flew to fame when his novel Notes From an Exhibition was selected for the Richard and Judy Book Club in 2008.Yet he has also written a film, scripts for television sitcoms, and many articles and reviews for newspapers and magazines. All of these are represented in the Archive, and you can browse the catalogue here.

If you are on campus, come and have a look at my display!

Cornish Archive Network

Yesterday, Sarah and I attended a Cornish Archive Network (CAN) meeting, which meets four times a year, at the Cornwall Records Office in Truro. This was a great introduction to the various teams across the County. Those who attended were from a range of organisations: community, voluntary and professional, and most of the meeting was taken up discussing the progress of each organisation, updates and opportunities. Being new to the meetings, this was a good way to hear about what everyone does. I was particularly interested in the St Ives Archive, which is largely volunteer-run and had had an exhibition on about living in St Ives in the 1930s, focusing particularly on children and whether they were happier then or now. This had been put together by an A-Level work experience student and all in the space of a week!

We reported on the progress of all the building work and movings-around at Tremough and how that might affect the Archive Service in the future, as well as the progress on our Preservation Assessment Survey, with the sampling almost finished. Sarah also mentioned how much we'd grown since she had last attended, having gained a trainee (me!) and a part-time term-time Assistant, Carole.

Many there were part of the 'Cornwall's Sporting Histories' series of events and exhibitions giong on throughout the year, which has been organised by CAN and the Cornwall Museums Group to raise awareness of the many fantastic collections of sports-related documents all over the county. There will be displays at sports centres and Cornish Mining World Heritage sites across Cornwall, and in the Heritage Pavillion at the Royal Cornwall Show.

We have some lovely colourful leaflets with more details in the Archive office, so please come and take one!

Tuesday 3 April 2012

A week in London

Last week I travelled up to London just in time for the beautifully hot and sunny weather to attend three days of training in Russell Square with the Archive-Skills Consultancy Ltd, which is aimed at providing basic and relevant training in archives and records management, and spent a fourth day at the archives of the Institute of Education.

The first session of training was an introduction to basic archive skills and covered several topics:
  • what are Archives?
  • collecting policies and accessioning
  • appraisal
  • providing access to Archives
We also had talks from two guest-speakers. Mark Pomeroy, Archivist at the Royal Academy, spoke about archival processing, arrangement and description; and Jonathan Rhys-Lewis, a Consultant in Preservation & Collection Management, spoke about preservation.

The second day was all about archival description and arrangement, which provided us all with a really in-depth introduction to description techniques. Both days involved facilitated discussions and exercises, which was great as it gave us the opportunity to network with the other people on the course, who were in similar situations but worked in a variety of different services. It was also reassuring that most of what was covered on the first two days I found familiar - which is a good sign that my traineeship and previous volunteer experience has been worthwhile and is setting me in the right direction!

I was most intrigued about the last day, which was an introduction to Records Management, since this is an area I have had practically no experience of and have always been a bit scared of! All the reading I did on RM before my MA interview was largely theoretical and seemed rather abstract, but this day provided a really practical overview of it and went through the realities of a Records Manager's job day-to-day, and I'm feeling much more confident about the RM module on the course.

The next day I went on a visit to the Institute of Education archives, who are in the process of taking over Records Management within the organisation. Since there's not been a proactive policy in place before, I was talked through how they were going to apply records managament from the back end, so to speak, and put plans into place for the future. I was given some appraisal work to have a go at as well. This I found a bit nerve wracking - having worked in archives for the past year I'm used to dealing with records selected for permanent preservation, so putting whole files in bags for shredding felt totally wrong! But very satisfying. I always enjoy visiting archives and seeing how they compare to others I've experienced, and this visit was particuarly apropriate as the RM aspect complemented the training I'd had the day before.

So it was a pretty full-on week, and I felt like I'd essentially had the whole Archives and Records Management MA taught to me in the space of four days, but I would totally recommend the Archive Skills Consultancy courses to anyone in a traineeship position like me or to anyone wanting a refresher. It's a really laid back environment, with lots of opportunity for networking and meeting like-minded people.