Continuing with our ‘What we are doing from home’ posts, today it’s my turn! My name is David and I am the Archives Assistant. During the lockdown I have had many different tasks to do including monitoring our enquiries email and tracking our online statistics to make sure we are still providing access to our records in some way and to find out what people are interested in reading about during these unusual times. However, my main tasks have been twofold. The first is keeping an eye on our social media and comms, including this blog, twitter and Instagram.
This mainly involves making sure our social media presence is active so people can still interact with our collections, even if in a small way. Part of this is making sure we have posts ready for any archive hashtags like #Archive30 and the new #ArchiveZ. Keep a look out for these posts in the following weeks!
The second task I have been set is transcribing the oral histories we have been collecting for our 150th anniversary celebrations. This has involved interviewing and recording previous staff and students talking about their experiences of university life and local culture when they were in attendance and reflecting on how this may have shaped their personal and professional lives.
Meeting and listening to our interviewees has been incredibly interesting/distracting! And so has learning how to do transcriptions: the style of writing and punctuation is very different and getting used to this was essential.
Working from home has definitely been a challenge but support has been fantastic and I am continuing on with my work despite the lockdown! Keep an eye on the blog for the next post on what we are doing from home.
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