This week's blog comes from Conservation Intern Sarah...

I am now over half way through my Conservation internship and the recent couple of weeks have been extremely full and very rewarding. 

Over the past two weeks I have had the amazing opportunity to work with two exhibitions that LHSA are involved with.  On Friday 15 November the ‘200 years, 200 Objects’ exhibition opens at the Talbot Rice Gallery and on 5 December ‘Collect.ed’ exhibition opens at the Main Library Exhibition Gallery, Edinburgh University.  As part of these two exhibitions, LHSA has lent an extensive amount of items to go on display. It has been my job to make sure that all of them have been condition checked, packed, transported and then installed. This was all done alongside LHSA Manager Ruth, and in conjunction with the curators, artists and exhibition installation teams from each exhibition.

I have also been busy running a conservation training day. This training day was designed for people who are thinking about conservation as a career, and want to get a better idea of the kinds of treatments that a conservator may do on a day to day basis. And for people who already work in the heritage sector, such as an Archivist who may require a better understanding of basic conservation problems and solutions. The day went really well and all 4 students seemed to have an enjoyable day and hopefully learnt a few interesting facts about conservation.

The rest of my time has been spent making folders for the re-housing of flattened parchment title deeds with pendant seals. I have designed a version of a 4-flap folder using acid free card that will encase the parchment. 

4-flap folder, with parchment on acid-free base

The parchment itself will then be attached to an acid-free card base using archival linen tape; this is used to reduce any movement of the parchment within the 4-flap folder. Some of the pendant seals are rather fragile and desiccated; so these seals will have an extra support of a Tyvek pouch/bag that will encase the wax/resin seal.

Parchment and seal in new 4-flap folder

Asking the right questions

This week, Project Archivist Louise has been finding out how we can reach a new generation of researchers...

Outreach is one of our key goals at LHSA – from a strong presence on social media to seminars for students, archive tours, advising family history and academic researchers and taking the archive ‘out’ in talks to community groups in Edinburgh and beyond. However, we’d like to extend our current work to reach a younger audience, particularly for primary and secondary schools. To this end, our Archive Intern, Sharon, and I went to the Mitchell Library in Glasgow yesterday to take part in a workshop on using enquiry-based learning with archives to reach groups of all ages.

I have to admit that before I attended the workshop (run by the Scottish Council on Archives), I was unsure about what enquiry-based learning was. When I think of an enquiry now, it’s usually in terms of the growing numbers of queries we get from academic and genealogical researchers each month based on the records that we hold. However, enquiry-based learning centres on asking open questions to allow students to get as much as possible out of their learning materials (which for us means archival records).

As someone with little experience of working with children and young adults, I found the day both accessible and extremely rewarding. At the beginning of the day, we put ourselves in the place of students and were faced with a short oral history transcript. Through asking the right questions (that didn’t encourage one word answers or the regurgitation of a list of facts) our workshop leader Douglas drew an enormous amount out of us based on both the feelings inspired by the text and how the single incident described could tell us so much more about the wider realities of the First World War for families at home. The rest of the day was spent choosing our own archive materials to base learning workshops around, and (more importantly) putting together our own questions. This was not as easy as it sounds: for example, instead of asking for the facts of what a newspaper article from the archive is reporting, it’s better to ask ‘How would you feel if you opened the paper one morning and read that?’ , which can lead to a lot more questioning and discussion.

Since the workshop was based on First World War sources, Sharon and I took along digital images of an autograph book held by LHSA, which was created by Craigleith Military Hospital nurse Ethel Miller. They were picked out for us by Kirstin, our Research Intern, who is working on creating educational resources from the varied archives that we hold from the First World War. The soldiers under Ethel Miller’s care wrote epigrams and (often adoring!) poems, as well as drawing cartoons based on their own attitudes and experiences of warfare. Although undoubtedly fascinating on first sight, after attending the workshop we’ll be able to use Ethel’s memories in so many more ways and bring nursing history alive for new audiences.

A page from Ethel Miller's autograph book

 

Conservation and Cataloguing

I’ve now completed three weeks of my internship and have finished the first phase of the cataloguing of LHSA’s photographic collection. A list of our items has now been completed and Archivist Laura has advised me which series they fit into. Our collection includes photographs and drawings of notable Scottish physicians, and Laura was also delighted to see a ‘photogravure’ (a printmaking process that replicates the detail and continuous tones of a photograph) of the eminent psychiatrist TS Clouston. Clouston was appointed as Superintendent of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum in 1873 and also served as a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. His publications on mental illness established him as a leader in the field of psychiatry.

 

 

Photogravure of Thomas Clouston

I have also spent a lot of time this week working with Sarah, the Conservation Intern. We have been working on an accession from the solicitors Gillespie Macandrew containing title deeds and legal papers, many relating to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Before Sarah can start treating the papers I had to assign numbers to each one so that she can keep track of the order they should be in. This was a useful experience for me and also an opportunity to find out more about the work of a conservator. As we numbered items, Sarah explained how they might be cleaned and what repairs might need to be carried out. It was enjoyable, if quite dirty work, and we had to stop often to wash 200 years’ worth of dirt from our hands! Some of the items we have been handling are beautiful parchments with pendant seals and pictured below is an indenture dated 28 April 1686.

Indenture, 1686

On Thursday we visited the conservation studio at the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. The conservator, Tizzy, made us very welcome and talked to us about their holdings and the work she does there.

I also had an opportunity on Wednesday to talk to our Research Intern, Kirsten about her work; we looked at some of the archival material she has been examining and decided together on ways in which they could be used as an educational resource. This was really interesting for me as this was the focus of my MSc dissertation, and something I’m hoping to find out more about next week when Project Archivist Louise and I attend the Scottish Council on Archives Enquiry Learning Workshop at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow.