London Internship: Week 2

This week was productive at a price. I got a cold. I started feeling a sore throat Monday morning, but I didn’t think anything of it until that night, when it didn’t go away. By Tuesday, I was pretty miserable. I had a hard time concentrating, but apparently no one really noticed because I was still doing good work. Tim Lawrence, Head of Library Services, introduced me to a new record type held in the Crisp Collections, the apprenticeship indentures. There were sixteen volumes of apprenticeship indentures with about one-hundred images each volume that needed indexing. Tim first asked me to index from an index created in the 1930s, which was fine. It took quite a while because there was a lot of information that had to be indexed, including all names, age, place, occupation, year, volume, page number, and any extra information. By the end of the week, I had only indexed about twenty-five pages, and Tim decided that it would be better to index volume by volume from digital images of the original volumes. I happily obliged, because it gave me more paleographic practice, as the documents ranged from early 17^th century to late 19^th century, and the handwriting was different on every page.

            On Wednesday and Thursday I worked with Else Churchill again. I created two paleographic exercises: the first on creating an accurate abstract and transcription of a document, and the other on reading secretary hand (Please see Appendix for a copy of these exercises). It was a very rewarding experience to use the knowledge I have learned from my classes and work at Brigham Young University to create paleographic exercises from my own experience, rather than leaning on information given to me. I used images that Else had previously received copyright for as the basis for these exercises. They will go online by the end of my internship.

            On Friday, I had the opportunity to shadow one of Else’s part-time assistants, Vanessa, as she did a hard-copy service. Vanessa would receive letters from the mail from patrons that would ask a certain collection to be searched for a name and date, and she would send back a copy of the image. The types of records we searched that day were:

Vicar General Marriage License Allegations

Faculty Office Marriage License Allegations

Trinity House Petitions

Civil Service Evidence of age (boxes in Store A)

St Andrew Holborn (Banns and License section)

I was able to look up films, find the image on their roll, and then create a hard copy image from the microfilm. I realized that getting a good-looking image was quite difficult, but doable. Vanessa told me that with my help, the hard copies took half the amount of time it normally would. We then took the printed images and put them in envelopes and sent them in the mail. This was a very useful experience because it taught me about search services and how this skill can help me as a researcher.

            That weekend Brian and I had the opportunity to go the Tower of London and learn all about the history of that place! I especially liked going into all the old churches and learning about the history of the Beefeaters.