Between the weeks starting January 8th 2010 to the week beginning March 22nd 2010 I spent my Fridays at Gateshead Central Library assisting the Local Studies Department in their endeavours to collate and ensure that all historical articles and evidence relating to the area were in good enough order and condition to allow the viewing public to see and use them for their own research.
At Gateshead Library, I was initially given the task of organising the Box Collections with the help of a database already begun by a previous Work Experience student named Jane Lumb. The Box Collections section of the Gateshead Library consisted of any historical evidence or data that the public deemed useful to the library had handed in and the library had kept. Duplicates were disposed of. Unfortunately the Library had initially maintained a lot of important historical data but The Tyne and Wear Archives had taken most of the interesting and important artefacts for their own disposal. Some of the articles I came across whilst working in the Box Collections had stamps on them referring to the fact they had once been at the Tyne And Wear Archives but had been returned due to lack of importance or interest in them. In all fairness the Gateshead Local Histories section and it’s collection of artefacts and scripts and such was not a wholly impressive array of historical data for anyone hoping to learn about the area. There were mostly old books people had found in attics, scripts that had all been written and performed in the local area and generally just bits of paper and old driving licenses and such. The end result of organising all this data would in the end hopefully allow the general public to view and learn from what had been collected but from what I had found whilst working it through it was that nothing seemed entirely significant or particularly useful for any historian hoping to seriously learn about the area.
Lumb had used Microsoft Access to input the information relating to the artefacts and had followed the Accession Numbers that all had initially been given to order them. The Accessions Numbers were essentially related to the year the library received and when. So the first item the library received in 1980 would thus be numbered 80/1; then say the fourth thing to be received in 1995 would be numbered 95/4. This was the system in which the artefacts were ordered in and it seemed to work quite reliably as when any artefact received information of who it was received from and any background information relating to it were written into the Accessions register. This was an old notebook that had been used over the decades to register any items or interest or artefacts received by the library. Unfortunately over the years not every artefact in the register had been retained as the Tyne and Wear Archive had of course taken a fair amount of historical evidence and there were also the case of general loss over the years. My job was to, with the help of Jane Lumb’s Access Archive, to see what the Library had registered in the Accessions Register and what they currently had available to be used by the public and order it in my own way. This meant packing what I could find into a series of boxes and adding to the Access records their new box numbers and where those who wish to find them could. This took a couple of weeks of effort on my part to go through what was already found and ensure that were in the Access Datalog and if not that they were added and highlighted those that had not been found or were on the Access Archive but not in the place they were supposed to be.
My method of organising the Box Collections was quite a simplistic idea. I used the Accession numbers to order the artefacts and then went about putting them into boxes to the best of my ability. Because of the size of shapes of the artefacts some fitted better into different boxes and thus there was some overlapping and interchanging and it was not an entirely perfect system whereby all artefacts following the Accession sequence went into boxes 1 through 30. There were various shapes and sizes to consider, there were scrolls, books of multiple kinds, printing blocks and bags of smaller articles. It was my job to ensure they were all boxed safely and to input into the Microsoft Access system where, if someone were to look, to find them. I then was given the task of preserving the artefacts. There were a lot of loose bits of paper which could easily be muddled with others and also collections of books and such. I took my time ensuring all were kept separate and neatly in envelopes of various shapes and sizes. The most useful were the ones that had the folded in edges that allowed space for overflow and in turn fitted excessive amounts of paper. I then labelled the envelopes clearly with artefacts accession numbers to ensure that they would be easily recognisable. Also when it came to the more fragile of the artefacts, such as books that had particularly weak spines and covers, I used a special archivist tape to ensure that they were kept in a turgid position to prevent damage during storage.
After going through the boxes to ensure everything was stored in a suitable and safe environment I was then given some blank stickers in which I labelled the boxes in their ascending numbers and also wrote on what artefacts were inside the boxes. This allowed anyone viewing the Box Collections to easily see which Box contained which artefact.
The Box Collections was initially my only task and should have in theory taken up my entire stay at Gateshead Library. I also managed to organise and include any Over Size artefacts into the Box Collections database in a similar fashion to the one stated above much to my supervisors surprise. This all took me about 5 of the 12 days I was working at the Library and is due to nothing but my hard work and determination. At this point it was up to my supervisor to give me something else to work on.
Something that the library needed to be sorted was all the political paraphernalia that had been given to them over the years. This was essentially all of the political candidates in the area during the general election period over the years. Initially this canvassing was exclusively during the election campaigns but grew into an all year round monthly thing. All parties of various colours and policies posted such political pamphlets through peoples doors over the years and then they thought it was a good idea to give it to the library. For what historical purpose this was I can only theorise but I’ll assume it was to chart the progress of the various political parties over the years. The historical significance of this is essentially to see how the party’s policies changed and what they have to say about their opposition. Then of course with hindsight we can see how empty their propositions were in the end and also laugh at their ridiculous hairstyles. My job was to organise the pamphlets that harked back to end of the 60s up to present day ranging from all the prominent parties and those that were less prominent over the years. Most common were of course the three main political parties, Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrats, who were mostly known as Liberals over time. There was also the Liberal/SDP Alliance which had a beach ball as its logo. Seemed like a good group to put trust in but they persisted over the decades. This mammoth task seemed mostly unimportant to me and, if not slightly relevant with the upcoming election, a waste of my historical talents. But I did as asked and determined the best system to organise all of this political paraphernalia was by year to start with. Then I went on to split the parties in to their respective groups and put them into envelopes, once again I found the most useful envelopes to be the ones with the folded edges that allowed bigger amounts of paper to fit into them. In the end my system was simple yet efficient. Every year had an envelope for each party within it and was labelled as such, there was an envelope labelled ‘Conservatives 1978’ and another labelled ‘Liberal Democrats 1994’. For parties that only had a couple of shreds of paper I shoved them together and wrote ‘Communist/SDP Alliance 1980’ for another.
I then took it upon myself without any due encouragement, to input all of my data in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with my own ingenuity listing all the years ranging from 1967 to the most recent political pamphlets that I had 2009. I then listed all of the parties that I had found overall, a surprisingly high amount; then proceeded to tick off those which I had in which years.
My ingenuity and all around hard work was rewarded with what looked like a real historical task. A man by the name of Frank Kojay had come from some foreign country and, supposedly fleeing the Nazis, had settled in the idyllic land of Gateshead and its surrounding areas. He had been so taken by the area he created his own scrapbook depicting the beauty and history of the area with his own hand drawn sketches and paintings and beautifully written out Council Laws of the area and essentially focussed on the kinds of birds in the area and the industry and stuck in pictures of pretty flowers and woodland creatures. The massive tome had been missing from the library for quite a while when it had turned out one of the old librarians had taken it home with him and not given it back. Thankfully he had returned it not too long ago and now it was time for the library to in some way allow the public to glean the knowledge that Kojay had left. Unfortunately scrawled in pencil in the cover the book Kojay had declared that his scrapbook could only be viewed by the Head Librarian and esteemed library members. Fortunately he is now long gone and technology has advanced to a point where the library wished to photocopy the book and present it to the viewing public. The task given to me was to write a contents page for Kojay’s work. This essentially involved me sitting at a computer screen with the massive tome sprawled out beside me and writing down what was on every page and any bits that would seem relevant to a historian.
I learned very quickly, as aforementioned, Kojay was definitely interested in birds and had a list longer than anything else scattered through the book listing all the types of birds in some numerical order, I’ll assume, only known to him.
There was also a lot of Laws and Orders he had copied down which had been decreed by the Council of Winlaton which I’m sure were important somewhere in the distant past. Otherwise the book was beautifully decorated with sporadically placed paintings of scenes either copied from books by Kojay or viewed by him and painted. The book was trying to encapsulate the history and beauty of the Gateshead area and it would have been all the more touching and poignant had I any really idea or interest in what the area was about and its history. This task overall took about a day and a half of my time and was mostly spent looking through the massive scrapbook and listing the large amount of birds Kojay had seen on his travels and somewhat bored me.
I was then sent back to my fantastically organised Political Pamphlets and was told to create stickers to apply to them instead of my messy scrawl to place on the envelopes for future reference. I created the stickers, one for each and every envelope, and then spent a mind-blowing twenty minutes sticking the labels onto all of the envelopes. There was a sinking sensation that my duties at the library seemed more clerical than historical. I would discover with my next task that this was not untrue.
My next job was to organise the video collection the Local Histories Department of Gateshead Central Library that had manifested over the decades. It seemed somewhat futile to declare that this was a new age in which anything viewed on a screen was usually stored on flat circular discs known to the masses as DVDs and even now we were stepping into a new age whereby DVDs were even becoming ineffective and being replaced by Blu-Ray which was much more shiny and classy to say.
I went through the shelves of videos and came to the conclusion that my initial assumption that not mentioning DVDs would be ineffectual was confirmed. Most of the videos were covered in dust, grime and neglect and my hands stank like mouldy plastic until I got home where I doused them in fruity hand wash. Most of the videos were things that the Library staff had taped off the television about the area or relevant to Gateshead history in their minds. Little did they know in the years between 1985 and 1995 they would in a mere decade be taping things from their tele-box onto their tele-box to watch later, also pausing live television to go answer the phone or go to the toilet. There were some exciting tapes such as about 4 of the same video repeated 6 times about the Baltic, and a video about the tall ships, not to mention the CCTV footage of an old lady getting her purse snatched in 1985. It was a simple task of separating the pre-recorded tapes with their colourful boxes and the taped over videos that had Look North on. I then proceeded to number and collate them in the following completely random fashion, PRV 1, PRV2, PRV3, for the Pre Recorded Videos and VC 1, VC 2, VC 3 and so on for the average taped off the television lot. I then typed this all up into yet another database and organised the videos all neatly back onto their shelves.
My last day fast approached and having completed all tasks assigned to me I assumed there would be nothing for me to do on my last day but my supervisor had one more facsimile insignificant, completely unhistorical task for me to do which he himself had probably never bothered doing. He gave me a box full of tape cassettes and a box of chocolates (a bribe perhaps?) to organise for him in a not dissimilar fashion to how I had sorted out the video cassettes the weeks before. My supervisor had not been at work that day and assumed as soon as I was finished I could leave. So my initial reaction to ask him if he’d ever heard of those new fangled, also disc imprinted mechanisms, known as CDs had ever crossed his mind. But of course with no one to mention this to I got on with my task and left before lunch with my chocolates under my arm.
Fair to say my hard work and determination had far surpassed the expectations of my supervisor at the library giving me more and more tasks hoping every week that I would take the rest of my residence to finish them and then realising he could use me to sort out all those stupid tasks he himself had never bothered doing. Is this what a smart, attractive, history graduate will find themselves doing? Working in an archive doing a job that a monkey could be trained to do or better yet a robot, which does not need feeding or lunch breaks, unlike monkeys and me. This Work Placement has taught me that it does not matter how smart or tenacious you may be, the only jobs available in libraries for history students are grunt based clerical duties which do not stimulate the brainwaves in any way shape or form. This is not something I can see myself doing in the future or wish to do. The fact that I was not even being paid to sit in a grim corner of a library with a radiator and spinny chair to keep warm and entertained during the colder and more depressing moments in my placement, well, the memory itself causes my soul to shudder despairingly at all those wasted hours. I have no doubt my work at Gateshead’s Central Library was valued and there is no real reason why I should have expected something more exciting or stimulating to do. I have experienced the harsh troubles of commuting early in the morning in the winter months to a depressing building with a day of mindless drone work ahead of me. I also, with my own ingenuity, learned to take my own tea bags and sugar-cubes and bought a little jug of milk on my journey there to wile away my breaks. This is the working world I have experienced and I have decided it is not for me. I will marry a rich Lord or Baron and live comfortably in his mansion caring for our hunting dogs and watching Jeremy Kyle on the television. This I feel would be a much more fitting environment for me as I chat to my Lord’s friends and families at gatherings with my sparkling wit and expansive historical knowledge. I will be valued and entertained living a life of luxury and this is something that I can see myself achieving in life.
Thank you for reading my report and allowing me the pleasure of experiencing such a thrilling work placement. I now know my place in life; I have a plan and a goal to work towards. This will impact greatly upon my life and it is only fair that I give you, the reader of this report, my thanks.
