Jamie started as an intern at the Centre for Research Collections last week, here he tells us about his first few days.

I have just finished my first of eight weeks as a Marketing and Outreach Intern with the CRC, and what a week it has been.  After a quick induction the first week has been filled with a mixture of meeting all of the fascinating people working in the department as well as gathering and researching ideas for some of the projects I am going to be working on.

 
Since I have started, my mind has been blown at least once a day by the interesting things that everyone is working on, and the more this happens the more eager I have been to make my internship successful so we can share some of the stories I have heard with everyone else!

 
On that subject, here is a little bit more about what I’m doing.  As a marketing and outreach intern I’m looking over some of the existing strategies as well as researching, and possibly creating, new ones.  Basically I’m looking at ways in which to reach out to more people and let them know about the department and give them a better understanding about what everyone does.  I am finding it quite exciting because I get to meet and discuss with everyone all about their roles so I can have a better idea of how to promote everything.  By this point you are probably wondering how this led to the destruction of a city.                        [Just one of many scenes of devastation included in the photo album of Caen]

Well, it started with all the news surrounding the D-Day Anniversary, I started asking around to see if anyone had information about a collection relating to this that we could post to our Facebook and Twitter pages.  I was directed to a photo album in the collection showing pictures and postcards of the city of Caen in Normandy.  The city of Caen was first attacked on D-Day by the allies, but initial assaults were unsuccessful and the battle for Caen ended up waging on for most of June and July.  During this battle Caen suffered from heavy bombing and destruction of a lot of its buildings.  The photo album I looked through was mostly before and after pictures and it was sad to see many beautiful buildings on postcards and then next to it a photo of the same spot but with nothing more than a pile of rubble.  The album had been presented by a Professor John Orr, who was a professor of French here.  In the catalogue book there was another entry that was a collection of telegrams and newspaper clippings from John Orr, so I decided look for more information behind the Professor’s link with Caen.  Going through this collection I found out that Professor Orr was the Chairman of the Edinburgh-Caen Fellowship, and worked hard on getting the people of Edinburgh to donate food, money and emergency items to Caen following the destruction of their homes.

[Two images showing before and after the assaults]

I could go into a lot more detail on what I found out about the Professor and Caen but I think that I’ve given enough for a taster.  If you want to find out more you could pop to the Centre for Research Collections’ Reading Room in the Main Library and take out the album yourself and read all about these important events in our history.

I am sorry to disappoint those of you looking to find out how I caused the destruction of a city! If you haven’t realised, it was about how my internship led on to finding out about Caen. I am a little clumsy but have never done anything like destroying an entire city… yet.  I hope you’ve enjoyed my first blog – hopefully they’ll let me do another one…

Thank you for reading, and thank you to DIU for supplying the images.

Jamie

Beth and Fiona have recently started as cataloguing interns in the CRC, and tell us about their first experiences…

Thesis cataloguing comes with its perils, for a start, until the beginning of February we were both blissfully unaware of the horror of the unnumbered page.  Few sights can strike fear into the heart of the intrepid rare books cataloguer quite like erratic pagination!

However, we are glad to report that this internship is not exclusively page counting, and every now and again something, or someone, truly exceptional comes along.

Among the hidden gems of the past couple of weeks, we found a 1930’s PhD thesis in physics that was submitted by a woman named Gladys Isabel Harper.  A woman submitting a thesis in 1930 may not be particularly unusual, especially thanks to the progressive thinking in Edinburgh at that time, but this woman’s career certainly took an exceptional trajectory and one that even by today’s standards would appear highly impressive.

Born Gladys MacKenzie, she was the daughter of an iron founder and teacher from Edinburgh and was educated at Craigmount School in the city.  She graduated with an MA in 1924, with a first in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy (now known as the physics department).  As part of her PhD on J-phenomenon in x-radiation, Gladys submitted an article co-written with E. Salaman during her time at Newnham College in Cambridge where she was appointed a lectureship in 1926.  In 1929 she resigned her post at Cambridge and married Wallace Russell Harper (PhD) who was a fellow physicist and published two books in the subject in 1961 and 1966.

Gladys’ PhD was granted in 1930, after she was married and while she was working in the natural philosophy department at Edinburgh University with Charles Glover Barkla, who won a Nobel prize for his work in a the field of x-radiation.  Together, they wrote two articles published in Philosophical Magazine in 1926.  The final leaf of Gladys’ PhD is a letter from her to the librarian at Edinburgh University stating her address in Bristol University where she was a lecturer in the department of Physics until 1947.

As we continue our quest to organize the intellectual heritage of EU, we may get shudder at the thought of chemistry PhD students who apparently had only a loose idea of how page numbers work (hint: they generally go up, one at a time), but it’s all worth it to make the work of people like Gladys Isabel Harper visible to more students today.