MA Museum Studies Placement Week 7-8

My time now at the University of Leicester Archives and Special Collections has ended, and I am proud of what I have achieved. Through a lot of hard work, I was able to catalogue the Rose Griffiths Collection in its entirety. All 371 items have been looked at, cataloged, and repackaged. I was also able to write about my experience every other week with each of these blog posts and looking back on the others I can see the journey I have taken to get to this point and how much I have grown. What I was able to accomplish in week 7 is the last touch up of the catalogue, completing the box arrangement, preparing for a final presentation of what I have done, and finalizing interview questions for an interview with Rose Griffiths. I still have items to digitize and a final exhibition to finish, but all the challenging work of labels and picking items has already been completed. I hope people will enjoy what they can learn from it.  

Week 8 has been both a hectic and relaxed week completing the exhibition, doing an oral history interview, and finishing any other last tasks for the catalogue and exhibition. With the oral history interview, I interviewed the author Rose Griffiths and was able to provide much more context about her career and many of the books in the collection. My favorite story was how she accidentally got into writing children’s non-fiction and kicked off her career. I was able to create a transcript for it to make the recording easier to access for future researchers using some online software. I also was able to update a couple of the descriptions in the catalogue because of the further information given in the interview that helped to contextualize some items. Finally, I finished the exhibition, which I hope will launch sometime next week. This has been a bit of a challenge since the audience for the exhibition is a bit ambiguous, with the exhibition not having a direct target audience, just the public. However, the language used should be accessible to everyone who wishes to read and look through the exhibition. I hope that people will enjoy listening to the excerpts from the interview with Rose Griffiths talking about her career and how she gives her own information on each part of the publishing process. My time at the University of Leicester Archives and Special Collections was fantastic. The team here is great and extremely helpful and I could not have asked for more.