I’ve had quite a long break from my blog to do Christmas, write
an essay for my uni course and take two trips away - more on this in a minute!
Things are really heating up from now on, as I’ll have two uni modules plus
will be spending time working on my application for postgraduate study, keeping
up with the latest ARA news, etc. However, I really want to continue this blog until
my internship ends in mid-March, so I’ll give it a go!
I’m back in the Brotherton library and it’s all change for
me. Thursday 15th was my last day in the Art Store and I’m really
sad about it! I have to move on to other things, plus my work there is pretty
much done - I’ve found all the artworks I’m aware of. In fact, I’m pretty
amazed because, on my very last day, the fantastic Collections Assistant from
the gallery team found the remaining group of four drawings I’d been looking
for for months! I had just enough time to make records for them all. Which
means, thanks to her, I now have a full house!
As of next week, I’ll be starting to learn how to digitise
artworks… I thought I’d only be doing this for a couple of days, but have now
been told that it’ll be for two (short) days per week for 4-5 weeks! I’m
freaking out a bit, as I’ll have to work with what are, effectively, giant
cameras for most of the time, and while I can handle software, machines are, on
the whole, not my friends. When I was a receptionist, the fax machine went
wrong literally every single time I tried to use it, so who can tell what will
happen when I try and take control of a giant camera. However, I’m still really
eager to find out about digitisation, and it will be useful to add this to my
experience, so I’ll give it a shot…
I was all geared up to tell you about my new project -
cataloguing a whole collection of Japanese prints! - but I feel I must leave
that for next time so I can tell you about my latest archiving-related trips
away, both of which took place in the past two weeks.
First, I went down to
London to the Digital Preservation Coalition’s student conference.
This was in the British Library’s posh conference centre,
which gave me the added bonus of visiting the library, which I’d never done
before. The building was a lot more modern than I’d imagined, and all the different
levels, eg an upper and a lower ground, made it a bit confusing! Also, security
was really tight and I had my bag searched (embarrassing as I had my overnight
stuff in there!). Was great to have a quick look around though, and I visited
their Gothic exhibition, the highlight for me being the two pages from Mary
Shelley’s original manuscript of Frankenstein, one of my favourite books (I
nearly cried!).
The conference was all day and packed with presentations
from practitioners from major organisations. It was well worth going out for,
as only in London would I have heard talks by archivists from the Parliamentary
archives, the BBC and the British Library. I found the last two particularly
interesting. Deon Cotgrove,
operational manager of the BBC’s archive centre, talked about his huge, ongoing
task of archiving BBC content from across the years. This really took me back
to my visit to the Yorkshire Film Archive, where I learned about the need to
migrate content from near-obsolete tape formats and the decisions they had to
make about what material was suitable for the costly process of digitisation.
Look at a video about the BBC’s archive here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/technology/broadcast-technology/television/article/art20130704121742520
The talk by Helen Hockx-Yu from the British Library was also
interesting. She is managing a project to archive web content, in keeping with
the ‘Legal Deposit’ act that came into effect only in 2013. She and her team
crawl the web selecting and archiving websites significant to researchers, ones
that provide important information about British life and culture at any one
time in history. Snapshots of these are then made available to view on the UK
web archive: take a look!
I hadn’t known about this project, so this talk was quite
enlightening.
As to the rest of the day; I’d say I was confused by some of
the more technical aspects of digital archiving, and a bit overwhelmed by the
sheer number of acronyms! However, the conference was aimed at PG students who
would naturally be a bit further on in their knowledge than I am, and I did take
notes so will be Googling aplenty to find out what all the terms mean. (I hear
the OAIS is hugely important…)
So - my second trip was to the University of Aberystwyth, Wales,
to find out about their postgraduate course in Archive Administration. I won’t
make this post too much longer but I can say I had a brilliant time, and really
was pleasantly surprised. Most people I’d spoken to about the town had
described it as ‘isolated’, with one person saying she’d heard ‘you have to drive
for two hours to find the nearest Topshop’! In fact it was nothing like this;
there was a good mix of high street and independent shops and a few lovely
cafes (or ‘caffis’ in Welsh!). From what I’ve found out, the transport links
aren’t that bad either, and the railway station is in the centre of town. It
was a bit cold for the beach but I explored the town and the rather quirky ‘Ceredigion
Museum’ and ate in a nice veggie restaurant. It was just all really beautiful,
with all the good things about a seaside town but none of the tacky elements!
Plus the mountainous location and the ease of getting to Snowdonia or just out
for fabulous walks.
The uni was no less impressive. When I first got there, it
seemed tiny and I was like, ‘um… what?’ - until I realised this was the
smaller, separate ‘Llanbadarn’ part of campus and not the whole thing! Once I
got used to the fact the university was up a steep hill and kind of cut off, I
began to really like it; there are things about it that are (I’m afraid to say)
definitely better than Leeds. There seems to be a friendlier, small-community
feel - plus the cafés are better (v important to me obvs!). Also, the National
Library of Wales is round the corner, and, on the main part of campus, there is
a massive, amazing arts centre with theatres, galleries, an arty shop, nice café,
cinema… Wow is all I can say.
A tutor kindly gave up her time to answer my many questions
about the course and show me round, and I was happy with pretty much everything
I heard. I’ve now made up my mind to apply for a place. I’ve always loved
Wales, the course is right for me and a complete change of scene would really
do me good. Since I announced this on Facebook, a few people have commented
that family members went there and loved it - and my own cousin did too, which
I’m sure will help. I’m starting work on my application asap - cross all digits
for me!
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