Volunteers

Over the last few weeks we have been very busy in the office with several work experience and volunteer placements. It's been great to see so many students interested in what we do and wanting to come and have a go themselves! Often coming from creative disciplines, it has been quite eye-opening for us to see how they react to our collections and sometimes end up using them for inspiration. We try to match their tasks to their interests, so for example we have one regular volunteer, a Fine Art MA student, with a particular interest in photography who we have given a repackagaing project on the Ian Stern Archive. Ian Stern was an important photographer in the '60s and '70s, and the Archive contains negatives, prints, manuscripts and a fascinating range of darkroom experiments. The project has been a great success and she has begun to really get to grips with the collection, which is excellent for us as we have very little information about this particular archive. We regularly use the Ian Stern material so having it repackaged will make it much more accessible for users, and much safer to use from a preservation point of view.

Another success has been our Twitter Project. The Archive and Special Collections Service is aiming to launch its very own Twitter in the next few weeks and we have had some excellent work experience students in to research our collections for tweets. We gave a film student free reign over the vast array of books relating to film and film history in the Bill Douglas and Peter Jewell Collection and found some amusing quotes from filmstars. We've also had a history student, looking particularly at public history, who uncovered some rather interesting events in the history of University College Falmouth from local newspaper articles... So keep a look out for the launch of our new Twitter to find out more!

In the meantime, we've got a couple more volunteers and placements lined up and I'm vey much looking forward to seeing how they get on and what they come up with.