Dolores spent a week with the Archives and Heritage Team in July. Find out more about her experience in the blog below.

If you are considering a work experience placement at the Staffordshire History Centre, do it! You get a varied and interesting experience, with amazing opportunities. You will meet many great people, while learning about history. Another important thing about it is that it is mostly practical working with artefacts, documents, and preservation.

On Monday, I was shown around the History Centre and met Erica, who I would share the placement with, we then spent the morning with the Conservator, cutting out and folding envelopes and boxes, which was very relaxing and much more interesting than it sounds. Later, we tested one of the summer holiday activities, created a marketing poster and began creating an interactive activity based on domestic servants. We also found interesting inventions in books of historical headlines in the William Salt Library Collection.

On Tuesday, we went to the Museum Collection Stores and assisted with a tour for the volunteers, who were extremely interested in the artefacts, and so were we. We got to choose which old photographs we would show to the volunteers and later we filled out Condition Reports and photographed artefacts which are being loaned for an exhibition in Stone.

On Wednesday, I learned about how order forms for copies of documents and document research by the public worked, I also went up to the strongrooms and learned how to find and retrieve the correct documents, volumes, and artefacts. Later I continued working on the interactive activity, printing, cutting, and laminating the pieces before testing the activity on two willing participants.

On Thursday, we digitised some Second World War Irish immigration records, to make them more easily accessible to the public. In the afternoon, we identified photographs for a 1920s exhibition later in the year from the Staffordshire Pasttrack website. Later we finished working on the domestic servant activity and assessed it to make sure the updated version worked. After that, we went through the headline books again, this time to find animals doing interesting things, like a dog’s birthday cake or a cat in an advert.

On Friday, I started the day rewrapping and packing two boxes of toys from the 1940s and noted down their numbers. Then I made an inventory of items in the current “Beneath our Feet” exhibition. I rounded off my week writing this blog, reflecting on my placement and chatting to the Engagement and Access Manager about careers in museums, archives and heritage.

Overall, I really enjoyed it and wish I could continue doing this instead of school and will visit in the future. If you want a great and varied work experience, do choose this one, you do a mix of practical and computer tasks and learn quite a lot about history. You meet many wonderful people with interesting jobs, who can teach you some amazing things about history and Staffordshire through time.