Visit to the London Metropolitan Archives

Although my PhD research is being carried out in collaboration with The National Archives (TNA), I am always on the look out for any opportunity which might broaden my view of relevant issues. So when I saw a Behind the Scene Tour advertised on IanVisits’ calendar for the London Metropolitan Archives, I booked myself onto it.

The tour didn’t start off to well I must admit. When I entered I was directed to where the tour should start. However, as time passed, no one came to pick the other three and I for the tour. When 15 minutes had elapsed we went to try to track down what has happening. It seems that we were directed to the wrong room, and the tour had started without us! Around 20mins late a woman came to pick us up and start the tour for us.

The building in which the archives is housed was built for the Temple printing press in the 1930s. It was selected to become an archival building due to the very well supported floors it had to support the printing presses and which are now needed to support all the archival materials stored there.

Having been given a brief history of the place we were then led into the conservation space where we joined up with the rest of the group. A conservator was showing degraded cellulose acetate photographs and of course making us smell the unmistakable smell of vinegar. He had previously discussed with the rest of the group some issues with a map and a bound book which he briefly summarised for us.

From the conservation studio we were then led to the Image and Design area where we were introduced to David Tennant (no, not THAT one). He explained that the work of the department was to producing advertising material for the organisation. However, the main job relevant to the archive is that they provide an imaging service for people for materials which cannot be photocopied, such as parchment, bound books, or hand-coloured materials.

The last area we visited was the archives themselves. Having often been inside TNA repositories I was of course not particularly overawed like some of the others were. They looked as I expected a well-functioning archive to look like. I tried to ask about environmental control (as I didn’t feel that cold in there), but besides being told that there is a set-point it is kept at, I didn’t learn much more.

Coming to the end of the tour I would say I would have two suggestions to others thinking about going on this tour:

1. Do go!
2. Make sure you’re at the right place! The tour leaves exactly on time we were told so if no one comes at that time start asking around.

Filed under: Events and Activities, archival repositories, Behind the scenes tour, cellulose acetate, David Tennant, environmental control, Ian visits, Image and Design, London Metropolitan Archives, Temple printing press, The National Archives, TNA

Communication

As a science-based PhD student in the UK one of the main messages which is constantly filtering down to me is that being a scientist and a good communicator is a difficult thing to do. There are constant efforts to give science students communication skills training where the starting point is often that it is difficult to make science understandable to the general public, but it is something we should aspire to.

Earlier this week I was reading a post on Andrea Sella‘s blog: Tim Radford on Science Communication and came across this gem:

If you think scientists are bad communicators go to an English conference or one on history of art.

As a PhD student working between the arts/humanities and science this rang so true with me! It is often quite easy to spot someone from the arts/humanities from a mile away at conferences or other meetings. As Andrea wrote, they tend to read from a prepared text, rather than expected to be talk their way through the presentation – and this is expected not just accepted sometimes. In fact even people ‘higher up’ in academia do this (as evidenced during the 2 lunch hour lectures I attended at UCL this month, one by a chemist and one by a humanities lecturer).

Over my time here I have spoken to a few arts/humanities students. What I have gathered from them is that the issue of communication skills is not something which comes up quite often in their training/personal development. Nevertheless, presentations in these fields can be just as technical as scientific ones. I am not sure what to think about this, especially since my experience of academic institutions abroad does not really follow this very apparent dichotomy in presentation styles. The one ‘reason’ I have been given is that English has so many nuanced words that it is essential that you use the exact word you mean. But wouldn’t this also be true for people in the sciences?

Filed under: Events and Activities, Public Engagement, Rants, Complaints and General Malaise, Andrea Sella, arts, communication skills, humanities, lunch hour lectures, Science communication, science students, Tim Radford