Volunteers and interns work away

This year LHSA has hosted two Artlink interns, 23 volunteers, one placement student and five conservation, archive and research internships.

All these have given LHSA staff the opportunity to pass on their skills and help those interested in joining our sector get relevant experience. Under our supervision, the work of interns and volunteers has also contributed to LHSA’s core services to preserve and make accessible the collections.

The latest two conservation and archive interns began work here in October and are pleased to be contributing to the success that LHSA has had in supporting both internships with a stipend attached and voluntary work placements.

Sarah, the conservation intern, has been tasked with working on an accession from local solicitors, Gillespie Mcandrew, that contains a selection of parchment title deeds, other related papers and architectural plans from the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. This 10-week internship has involved the condition survey, treatment proposal and treatment of the whole accession. The main treatments have involved the re-housing of parchment title deeds, surface cleaning and tear repair of many letters, pamphlets and booklets and the humidification, pressing and re-housing of large oversized items, mainly architectural plans and a very fragile plan on transparent paper.

Sharon, the archive intern, has been cataloguing photographs from LHSA’s collection, putting photos into appropriate series, entering the items into the photographic database and assigning a new reference number to each item. This material will now be accessible to a much wider public. One photograph of note is that of Lillian Lindsay, the first woman to graduate as a dentist in Britain and the first woman to become President of the British Dental Association. She graduated LDS (Hons) RCS from the University of Edinburgh in 1895.

These internships have also offered the opportunity to gain experience in a wide range of associated professional tasks, from completing loan and accession paperwork, to helping with enquiries and hand listing. We have already said au revoir to Sarah, who has used the experience with us to secure a 12-month position at the British Library, and we wish all our volunteers and interns every success in their future careers. We look forward to continuing this work in 2014!

The top image shows the accession Sarah worked on before treatment; the middle image shows Lillian Lindsay; and the bottom image shows, from left to right, Kirstin, our research intern, Sarah and Sharon after giving their presentations on their internships to Centre for Research Collections staff.