We were delighted to be joined last week by Year 10 student Dora for a week of work experience in Special Collections. Below Dora shares some of her impressions and reflections on the experience. We would like to take this opportunity to thank Dora for her excellent work and wish her every success for the future.

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This week I was lucky enough to do my Year 10 work experience at the Special Collections and archives at the The University of Exeter. I met the majority of the team, who all spoke with me about what their job entails, a surprisingly wide range: from monitoring bug traps to handling and caring for centuries-old items. In my time at Special Collections I also tried a number of tasks that a person working as an archivist can expect to encounter. 

The task I probably spent the most time on was stocktaking the rare book collections. The idea of stocktaking is essentially just checking everything’s there. Easy, right? Not necessarily. All items in the archive are given a code, to help identify them, but with the 100s of books, maps, pamphlets and journals you’re sifting through it can take a while to wrap your head around it. Thankfully, after a while I think I got the hang of the system. I actually found the stocktaking really fascinating, particularly the pamphlets in the Hypatia Collection. These, booklets, advertisements, short stories or poems give you an insight into how people lived, and on the views they held.

Another activity I was asked to help with was cataloguing architectural plans from the University Archive. This task involved putting the plans into polyester sleeves, to protect them from any damage, recording details like dates and measurements, and then numbering and labelling the plans. While I did not find this quite as interesting as the stocktaking it was really enjoyable to get a hands on look at the plans, some of which were really beautifully and expertly drawn. 

Another aspect of the job was retrieval and re-shelving. If you’re interested in looking at anything in the collections, the way to go about it is to book an appointment in the reading room. When you make this appointment, people also put in a request, listing everything they would like to look at during their session. Then the staff working in the archive, or in this case me, will go into the strong room (where many archives and books are stored) and find everything you require for your research.

I found this part of my work experience really enjoyable – mostly because it was essentially just a scavenger hunt! However, what goes up must come down and what goes out of the strong room must go back, so after searching for the listed items, I also had to find the home of a few items that people were done with. Admittedly this wasn’t quite as fun, but it did help me thoroughly understand the organisation system. 

Finally, this work experience also helped me gain an understanding of the university campus. On Wednesday I was taken on tours around areas like: the University Library, where I was shown how to pick a specific book out of the thousands of shelves; the Digital Humanities Lab, where we were given the opportunity to use a 3D printer; and also the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, where we were shown many of the fascinating items on display. 

Overall I really enjoyed my work experience here. The Special Collections team were extremely welcoming and it was a great work environment. Furthermore the hands on work with primary sources, particularly the pamphlets that are abundant in the collections, has inspired a new curiosity in a field of work that I honestly previously knew very little about.