Category Archives: Collections

Volunteer of the Month – September 2013

Jessica Macaulay

Digital Imaging Unit Volunteer

From February – August 2013 I volunteered two afternoons a week to work in the Digital Imaging Unit under the direction of Malcolm and Susan. During the course of my time in the DIU I participated in a number of projects ranging including cropping images for the online book reader, enriching the metadata for the online images of the Rashid al-Din, and researching a number of images and objects for key-wording before they were uploaded into flickr.  At the end of my stint I was able to assist in setting up a twitter account for the CRC (@UofECRC) in order to help promote the physical and online collections and have continued to contribute to the twitter account from Canada.

https://twitter.com/UofECRC

 

Volunteer of the Month – August 2013

Sandi Phillips

Conservation Volunteer

Once a fortnight for the past two years I have been conserving 550 sheets of paper belonging to the Carmichael Watson Collection. These date from the late 1800s to the early 1900s and are all mostly in Gaelic, written by the scholar Alexander Carmichael. Most of the sheets needed quite a lot of attention. The majority of them needed surface cleaning. This entailed using a chemical sponge and gentle use of an eraser. There were also sheets which had rust on them where metal paper clips had been attached. Rust was removed with the tip of a scalpel using magnifying glasses. Great care was needed so that only the damaged fibres were taken away. Tears were repaired using Japanese paper and wheat starch paste with the pages pressed to ensure the ‘glue’ had dried. Finally all the sheets were placed in acid-free folders and housed in a low-acid board box.

Sandi Phillips

Some of the sheets had interesting watermarks on them and as an aside from the practical element of this paper conservation I decided to do a bit of investigation in my own time. Some of the watermarks originated from a papermaker in Glasgow. I found out that the United Wire factory which I live near created the wireworks used for making paper, so it is possible that some of the paper on which I had been working might have been created on wires made in this factory.

Intern of the Month – July 2013

Snezhana Savova

CRC Marketing Intern

I have been the summer Marketing Intern at the Centre for Research Collections (CRC) for the past two months.  My task was to research and review the current marketing strategy of the department and to propose ways to improve it in order to further develop the CRC and to better promote the various impressive Collections it is home to.

I spent the initial two weeks of my internship to discovering the Collections and the hidden treasures, many of which I have never heard of before I came to the CRC.  Subsequently, I researched the printed promotional material, as well as the online and social media presence of the department and started work on their improvement.  My main aim was to raise the awareness for the existence and significance of the Collections; the target audience included all students and staff of the University, people who use the collections for their research purposes and the wider public.

After four weeks, I presented my suggestions to the department based my research of the current strategy of the CRC and the activities of other similar institutions.  My presentation covered a broad range of topics and areas to be worked on in order to present and promote the CRC and the Collections in a more inspiring, exciting and remarkable way.

For the remainder of these two months, I worked on the implementation of my suggestions and succeeded to actually make some real changes and improvements.  Many new and innovative ways to deliver our message to diverse groups are now utilised and there is significantly higher awareness of the department within the University.

My time at the CRC was very pleasant and fruitful and it contributed both to the growth of the department and my personal one.  I feel I have gained valuable skills which will be highly beneficial for my future career development.  Furthermore, I met great people and had the pleasure to work in a very positive and supportive environment.

Finally, I am more than happy to continue helping the CRC and am looking forward to coming back as a volunteer during term time.

Volunteer of the Month – June 2013

Sophie Volker

CRC Archives Volunteer

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I have been working on the Quatercentenary Collection for more than 6 months. In 1983 the University celebrated its 400th anniversary and, as part of these celebrations, the University library put out a call to all alumni and ex-staff (this was before the archive existed), asking them for contributions to a collection which would be used to illustrate student life at Edinburgh. Hundreds of people responded, and the library was sent thousands of items including class cards, degree scrolls, lecture notes, tickets to dances, menus for club dinners and photographs. It’s not just documents, though – I have found two embroidered velvet caps and a box of 1930s cigarettes! I think my favourite thing in the whole collection is a dance card from the 1920s, which has a tiny pencil attached by a piece of ribbon. The collection ranges in date from the 1870s to the 1970s – more or less 100 years of student life at the University of Edinburgh.  Many people who sent items also included letters with their recollections of their time at university. This enormous, important collection was then split up according to type: photographs in a box with other photographs, boxes full of party invitations, boxes and boxes containing only class cards.

My job is to put each individual accession back together again – instead of items being catalogued by type, they will be catalogued in groups according to who deposited them. This has meant making a list of what is in every one of the 42 boxes, and then going through every box and taking out the separate items and rehousing them in proper archive folders and boxes. It is very satisfying bringing all the different items together to make a little picture of an individual’s time at the University of Edinburgh. I love knowing that these things will be catalogued in their proper place, and that one day someone will look at them and find out about an ancestor’s student days.

Volunteer Event – June 2013

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Some of our volunteers gave presentations at a special event yesterday to say thank you to our volunteers for the all hard work that they have been putting in over the past few months.  Eleven volunteers gave short presentations outlining the work they have been doing, what skills they have been learning and how their experiences have been helping them to develop.  We would like to say a big thank you to everyone who attended yesterday’s event in the CRC and especially to those who did presentations.

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Intern of the Month – April 2013

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

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

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.