Over the summer I was lucky enough to work with The Old Print Works on a summer internship, exploring the cultural heritage of the building.
I was joined by three other interns, all of us focusing on different approaches to learning about the building and Butchers Printed Products Ltd., the company who previously owned it. These approaches varied, including interviewing ex-workers to build up an oral history, as well as creating an accurate timeline for the history of the building.
My role was to work directly with the collection of objects related to the history of the building.
As someone who is aiming to work in heritage, this was an extremely exciting opportunity for me to gain experience with an archival role and to take a lead when it came to managing a collection. Over the course of about a month, I was able to organise and categorise the collection, with my main focus being on creating a database of every object in the collection. This was in order to make it easier for others to see what we had in our collection, allowing others to explore these objects and the connection they have to the history of the building without having to sift through the piles. Although by museum standards it may be a fairly small collection, I still enjoyed working with the items, a great range of objects from each stage of transfer production, from a hefty lithostone, to the tiniest stickers.
Putting together the database really pushed me out of my comfort zone and I learned a lot more about the problems facing anyone trying to manage a collection, and how best to overcome these obstacles.
As well as creating a database and making sure that the objects were properly stored and organised, I was also given the opportunity to make a display for the Heritage Open Day.
I was able to choose which objects to put on display, and then spent the day talking to the general public about how those items help us understand the history of the building. The open day was also lovely because many ex-workers attended the tea party thrown by the Old Print Works team, which gave me a wonderful opportunity to speak to these people and gain further insight into the collection and the history of the building. Talking to the workers really drove home the personal connections many of these people had with items in the collection, and with the building itself, and showed me that the building and the company it once housed were a key part of the local community. I’m very thankful to the Old Print Works team for giving me this opportunity to further develop myself as a museum professional and to get involved in expanding out knowledge of our local heritage.