We recently welcomed Olivia to our temporary offices to complete a work experience placement with the service. Below she shares the highlights of her week and her career goals. The team really enjoyed Olivia’s enthusiasm for history and wish her every success for the future.

My name is Olivia and I’m a current Year 11 GCSE student at a secondary school in the Moorlands. One of my main passions, and probably my largest passion is history and archaeology. I’ve always wanted to head down the archaeology route ever since I was quite young. To be offered this work placement is incredible as it is the closest I could get to what I’m heading to next, especially with the preservation and conservation side of the service, with the team’s conservator, Lisa.

I was going to try one of my local museums in Stoke-on-Trent, however one of my teachers approached me, and talked to me about the Staffordshire Archives and Heritage Service which sounded a lot more interesting to me. To look at a variety of collections, items, objects, documents, records; and so forth.

Over the course of my week working with the Staffordshire Archives and Heritage Service, I’ve been able to experience tours of the collections, varying from the Museum Collection Store to the Archive Strongrooms. This included the carriages, puppets, domestic collections, agriculture, amazing art and clothes worn from the hierarchy class system from the historical people and the common man of Staffordshire from the 1630s (Charles I’s hat) to an item from quite recently in 2019 of a pair of purchased F and F Tesco shoes.

My week here consisted of a good, wide range of tasks and activities set out by the Archives and Heritage Team as a whole. On my first day here, I helped the team’s Learning Officer, Lizzie, with generating resources as a part of a developing formal learning program. Thoughtfully creating a resource for use in early years and SEND classrooms, combining my skills, as the task required research and creative elements. I managed to develop my own understanding of the primary school history curriculum and the importance of history engagement at an early age.

That afternoon, I ran through some research of the history of photography and the various different processes it took to capture the very first photograph to Present Day models and makes of camera-like devices. I brainstormed and experimented the use of cyanotype photography applying my existing STEM knowledge to create a copy for a detailed instruction leaflet, for others also wanting to experiment with cyanotype photography. I wrote down some initial ideas for developing the activity into a standalone session, and once again developed my own understanding of the history and science curriculum and how an inter-disciplinary approach helps students and teachers.

My next day working with the team, I was looking around their offsite collection stores with Lizzie and the team’s Community Engagement Officer, Helen. I gained experience with a historical collection: skills including accessioning, object handling and object packaging.

An 1850s dress that I helped to cover and put away.

I worked with the team’s Conservator, Lisa and gained hands-on experience in a conservator’s workshop, handling and cleaning a delicate historical document with professional and approved tools. I learned a fair bit of scientific principles behind conservation and the complexities of preserving historical documents for future generations, as well as observing health and safety concerns in a working environment.

Working on a document in conservation

That afternoon I worked with the History Centre Assistants team who help with the enquiries from the about the Service’s collections, scanning orders like documents, handling phone and email enquiries and the retrieval of documents, ariel photography and maps from the collection strongrooms.

On Thursday I worked with the Hannah, the Community History Development Officer, who works with organisations like the Scouts and NHS, and the team’s Digitisation Officer, Ben, who scans and photographs the collections to upload them to the collections database CALM and the Staffordshire Past Track website. I spent the day researching images on Staffordshire Past Track, helping Hannah out with a Scouts project idea she had in mind, and worked to a deadline compiling resources for an outreach session.  I talked to Ben about navigating the internal database, gaining understanding of broader contexts in the heritage industry and discussed my career progression.

My final day here, I mainly spent with Helen and Lizzie working on my Asylum Project by creating an art piece inspired by primary sources, research into asylum casebooks and patients’ lives at the Staffordshire asylums. Hopefully, my artwork will be displayed on the History Centre micro site and used as an example to inspire future students also on their work placements here.

The Staffordshire Archives and Heritage team have been an absolutely incredible team to work with, and I would recommend this to anyone, student or otherwise, to perhaps have their work placement/experience here – and especially to anyone with an admiration of history and the history of Staffordshire.

Olivia – Year 11 Work Experience Student