After roughly 5 weeks, I am already in the middle of my internship at the University of Glasgow. I spent the first four weeks in the Archives and Special Collections and the fifth in the library of the university.
The Archives and Special Collections are located on the edge of the campus. I have to walk around 20 minutes from my bus station to the Archive. The library is only five minutes away from my bus station, which means 15 minutes more to sleep.
I continued with cataloguing the collection of Philip Hobsbaum. That was my main job. After the tea break in the afternoons, I assist the document delivery assistant. I help him find the items from the depositary and bringing them to the customer. Sometimes I also have to do some records centre destruction, which basically means destroying certain records from former staff or students of the university, after they exceeded their retention period. On each Friday I did, some digitisation of old photographs of buildings from the university and other buildings around the city.
The library of the University of Glasgow is on the opposite side if the street of the main building and has 12 floors. On each floor are different fields of study.
I am going to be in several different departments during the week. On the first day in the library, I was shown the branch libraries. The University has three branch libraries in Glasgow and we visited them with a taxi. I spent my second day in the information office and the IT-helpdesk. They showed me several things and talked with me about topics like accessibility of the library and its website, user experience or heat maps. These things were particularly interesting to me, because I could see similarities and improvements, which the libraries in Switzerland could make. During two days (Monday and Wednesday), I work on level seven with the maps and statistics. On the Thursdays, I will do something called rovering and shelving. I get a Staff t-shirt and walk around the floors of the library to check if everything is fine and works or if someone has a question. In addition, I will work in the Archives again on each Friday, where I will start a new project about former graduates of the university and what they did afterwards.
That’s about it. It has been an interesting five weeks so far and I am curious what the next half will have ready for me.
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