Author Archives: universitycollectionsvolunteers

Intern of the Month – April 2013

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Bagpipe Conservation

Abigail Chapman

Intern at St Cecilia’s Hall

http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/information-services/services/library-museum-gallery/museums-and-galleries/musical-instrument-museums

For the past three months, I have been spending two days a week researching the social history of St Cecilia’s Hall and the Edinburgh Musical Society, who commissioned the building in the early eighteenth century. My first task was to find concert listings for St Cecilia’s Hall in Edinburgh newspapers, to ascertain the repertoire of the society between 1763 and 1798. That involved hours of reading the Caledonian Mercury and the Edinburgh Evening Courant, and a few days at the Central Library reading the EMS Minutes. Mari, whom I have been interning alongside, has worked on organising the Langwill-Waterhouse Archive, consisting of dozens of boxes of uncatalogued material.

Musical instrument moveWhat has made this internship most special, though, is all the odd jobs that I have ended up doing, whether that be sorting through the odd folder of the Langwill-Waterhouse Archive; conserving tarnished bagpipes for an upcoming symposium; or learning about the proper care of instruments as part of the relocation of EUCHMI’s collection to improved storage facilities. In the process, I have learned about instruments I never knew existed, gained archive management and conservation experience, and polished up my research skills into the bargain.

Interns of the Month – March 2013

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Fiona Menzies and Charlotte Anstis

LHSA Archive Intern and LHSA Conservation Intern (Fiona and Charlotte have been working with us as the LHSA interns for the past 10 weeks).

http://www.lhsa.lib.ed.ac.uk/index.html

IMG_2305 Fiona: I have been working on part of the LHSA photograph collection.  My role here has been to create a new finding aid and re-house the photos (4000 photographs out of 40,000).  Many of the photographs I have come across have been very interesting.  The experience here has been great fun and I will be returning as a volunteer to complete the project since I am determined to finish it.

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Charlotte:  During the 10 weeks I have been working on a project to conserve and re-house items from a collection of letters, legal documents and title deeds relating to the Royal Edinburgh Infirmary.  The earliest item is a parchment title deed dated 1594 and material continues up to the early 20th Century.  An important part of the project was to survey the collection (which has not been catalogued) and decide with the LHSA archivist and conservator on items to prioritise.  The parchment title deeds were a focus, but safe handling was difficult at times due to the way they are folded, their size and the nature of parchment as a material.  I did some research to find the most suitable method of flattening the title deeds (where appropriate), storage has been created and a special folder made to help with safe handling when opening the title deeds.  Some of the paper documents contained iron gall ink which was a concern as iron gall ink can severely degrade paper.  Treatment options were chosen that were sensitive to the nature of iron gall ink and that would help to stabilise the documents.   Image

Other activities were included in the internship; I led a training day for volunteers to learn about the basic principles of conservation and I have helped with student seminars as well as attending visits.

I have had an amazing time here at the University and have learnt so much! I really feel like a part of the team, and I am really sad that this is our last week here.

Volunteer of the Month – February 2013

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Lynne

Lynne Bulmer
Volunteer with The Carmichael Watson Project

http://www.carmichaelwatson.lib.ed.ac.uk/cwatson/

I have been volunteering in Special Collections and Archives for a few hours each week since June 2011, with my work mainly focussed on the Carmichael Watson project. For those few hours, I usually find myself in the company of lowly crofters and paupers, scraping a living off the land in the more remote areas of mid-late 19th century Scotland. My work centres on researching and creating biographies of the people visited or mentioned by Alexander Carmichael in his many transcription and field notebooks. In these notebooks, Carmichael collected such things as spells, songs, charms, prayers and stories at the heart of the Gaelic culture of the time. Through studying their birth, marriage and death certificates together with census records, I construct a brief biography of the informants’ lives and ensure that significant dates are made ‘machine-readable’ for future researchers, as well as checking any reference made in the notebooks to each person; all these details are gradually being made available on the Carmichael Watson Project website. As well as my enjoyment of being a ‘detective’ in constructing the biographies, it also gives me great satisfaction to think that my work may be of use to those researching in the field of 19th century life in the Highlands and Islands, especially as I lived in the Highlands myself for around 15 years.