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:
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.
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
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.
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