During July Amelia joined us for a week of work experience. Amelia has just completed the first year of her A-level studies in Cannock. This is her reflection on the week.

After a week of work experience with the archiving team I wanted to write a blog post detailing my thoughts and experiences throughout the week

To gauge how useful my experiences were, I should start by outlining what I expected to gain out of the entire experience. If I was asked this at the start of the week, I would have said that I had no idea what I was getting into because I didn’t know much about the service the archives offer. This led me to be more intrigued and interested in what the team would have me doing. Prior to my first day I wasn’t too sure about how appealing an archiving job sounded but after the first day and meeting the members of the team I would be working with I realised that the work culture at the archive had character a great team morale and it had made me realise that working at a desk didn’t always mean silence all day.

The team had a personality that made the workplace feel welcoming and relaxed. I now feel I have gained more of an idea of what an archiving role involves which has shifted my perception of the work that’s goes into maintaining and amassing such a collection.

Throughout the week I learnt huge amounts about various fields and their roles that I didn’t even know existed and I believe this to be because of the wide amount of task variation I was given. I had the opportunity to work one on one with various people working in different roles. This for me was not what I was expecting because I had assumed I would be shadowing the employees more than assisting with tasks for the archives. Overall, this turned out to be what I enjoyed the most as I feel I gained knowledge from practical tasks significantly faster.

This directly ties into the next question, what did I like and dislike about the experience?

I can confidently say that my favourite aspect of my entire experience was how interactive the work could be. Although I did enjoy learning about new areas and trying different tasks like cleaning documents with the conservation team, I found myself favouring the collection management side of the experience with a particular enjoyment of the organisational aspect of that. I believe this factor contributed towards my enjoyment with the currently on-going task I was set on day one

One of my first tasks was to alphabetise microfiche records. This is so they can be indexed for people searching for family histories or research for papers etc. I really enjoyed this task and ended up making decent progress into sorting them.

I also really enjoyed my time with Lisa, the Conservator, and Janet a volunteer who works with her. It was great to listen to them share their knowledge and explain what they do on a document-to-document basis. Along with that I shared time with Helen, the Community Engagement and Partnership Officer, at the museum collection stores. During my time with Helen, she took me on a tour of the museum collection and told me about the collections the store holds and how the staff maintains the collection as well as how the catalogue of the archive is added to. It was super interesting to learn how different things must be stored and how the slightest instability in temperature inside the vault can affect the collection. A personal favourite area of mine was the clothes archive as the varied nature of what was stored and how it was stored is fascinating as well as being able to clearly see how fashion developed over time.

It was fascinating learning from the team at the Archives and Heritage Service. I found a lot of the knowledge they all shared with me was typically something that is unable to be obtained by an academic course and was geared towards real world working environments.

After the entire experience I can very confidently say that I am even more interested in archiving and would like to pursue a career down this road. I believe that by having explored more paths within the archiving world during my experience I am more knowledgeable, which in turn has made me confident in my choice of choosing it as a potential career in the future.