A Plethora of Placements

This year marks 10 years of placements at the University of Manchester Special Collections. Over the past decade we have welcomed a variety of brilliant students who have helped us with projects ranging from cataloguing hundreds of newspaper clippings to setting up exhibition cases and repairing book bindings. We celebrated this milestone by engaging a record number of placements this year. It would be impossible to relate all the wonderful things our placements have achieved, but luckily, a number of our students wrote blogs about their experience.

Institute of Cultural Practices placements
Twenty-day long placements across the different Special Collections departments. This year we hosted eight placements working with collections, one placement with Reader Services, one placement with the Imaging team, and one placement with Teaching and Learning. The following blogs discuss the curatorial placements with the Humanitarian collection, the University Archives and Heritage Collections, and the Maps collection, as well as the placement with the Imaging team.

Ron Ockwell: A guiding hand for humanitarian aid

Your Manchester: Student Activism in the 1970s

Your Manchester: An Exploration of Manchester’s Legacy of Student Activism

Mapping change in Special Collections

Mapping the Change: Cataloguing Educational Wall Maps

Histories of Heritage Imaging at the John Rylands Library (Part 1)

Histories of Heritage Imaging at the John Rylands Library (Part 2)

Histories of Heritage Imaging at the John Rylands Library (Part 3)

History of Art placements

Three year-long placements in collaboration with the Art History department, where three students choose one or two items from the collections to study and promote. They produce two blog posts each and create social media content for the library to promote these items or collections.

Doppelgängers and Spectres: Hauntings in Early Photography

Remembering China’s Western Palaces

Pictures for the Christian Mass in an Old Prayer Book

Digitising the Seven Volumes of a Magnificent Missal

History of Science, Technology and Medicine placement

A twenty-day placement working with our science, technology and medicine collections (archival and rare books). This year we hosted a placement working on an illustrated annotated bibliography of works in our rare books collections related to the Liverpool and Manchester railway and its foundation.

Documenting the Birth of Rail Travel

Why do a placement with Special Collections?

It is an unfortunate truth that many organisations and institutions increasingly demand workplace experience as a pre-requisite for employment. This is certainly the case across the heritage sector, which is highly competitive even for those with experience. We offer placements in collaboration with university departments to help students obtain the necessary experience and skills in a friendly and constructive environment. In return, students help us deal with cataloguing backlog, help realise some of our wishlist projects, and enhance and add value to existing projects.

The benefits of placements are manifold. For instance, the students learn about the different roles in Special Collections and increase their employability by absorbing important workplace skills, such as communication and working collaboratively (which will benefit them, even outside of heritage). They gain practical experience with library systems, cataloguing standards, and processes, and in most cases leave with citable evidence of their completed projects via blog posts (see above). The institution benefits from new perspectives and ideas brought by placement students (especially around emerging technologies such as AI) and the enthusiasm and dynamism of the next generation of professionals. Interacting with the student voice in this way is also beneficial for our engagement work and object-based teaching and helps inform new approaches.

Finally, on a personal level, it is delightful to invite new students every year to the library and to help them figure out how to tackle collections, engage the public, or run a reading room. Their presence and enthusiasm is inspiring and cheering and we look forward to the next 10 years!

All placements at the University of Manchester Special Collections are part of a programme of study. Please email sc.teaching-learning@manchester.ac.uk with any enquiries.

Aya Van Renterghem
Special Collections Teaching and Learning Coordinator