Daisy Winchester – Work experience

Daisy and her two penguin pals

I thoroughly enjoyed my year 12 work experience here, it provided me valuable and interesting insight into collection management and curation that has really helped me refine my interests in historical collections and museums. By far the most unexpected activity was helping switch an Object Box used in Victorian schools (loaned to British Schools Museum) with two taxidermy penguins which was a uniquely charming experience (including making a social media post about their arrival), from this I also learned about recording loans and deliveries, (and a bit about Victorian schooling).

For the last two days of my placement, I focused on documents about the Offley Morris Men overviewing the group’s existence from their inception in 1955 to their dissolution in 2016. I helped log them into accession records both online and in the museum’s accession book, this was probably my favourite part as I got to examine real historical records for the first time. Making this an especially interesting experience was the personal and domestic nature of the records, including handwritten logbooks detailing their dancing tours and a Ladies Night menu signed and doodled on by attendees.

This experience has overall been very rewarding, from this I have learned the variety of jobs and unpredictability of each day working as a curator.