The Outreach team in UCL Special Collections recently hosted two students from the IOE BA Education Studies course.  Tasked with creating a pitch for a new after school club, Jiayi and Yunrui spent time getting to know the collections, learning about the Outreach programme and devising an original idea to present to staff at the end of their placement.  It was a pleasure to host them, and we hope to implement their project ideas in the next academic year.  This blog is written by Jiayi and Yunrui, and shares some of their reflections and learning at the end of their time with us.

Ella Zhang

After completing our Education Placement at UCL Special Collections, Yunrui and I are thrilled to reflect on the enriching experiences we had during our time here.

Throughout the placement, we developed a general understanding of UCL Special Collections. We had the privilege of engaging with key staff members, embarking on tours to Special Collection places on UCL Bloomsbury Campus. We were also introduced to key collection items and delved into stories behind them. Under the guidance of Daniel Dickins, we honed our skills in online collection search, catalogue navigation, and item viewing, equipping ourselves with invaluable tools for future studies.

We were introduced to the Outreach Programme in Special Collections under the supervision of Vicky Price, and the standout highlight in the placement for me was our participation in the after-school club Illustrate!, a part of the Outreach Programme at Special Collections. I visited Stratford School Academy, where I saw pupils enjoying perspective drawing in the workshop. Yunrui and I then visited UCL East with an authentic opportunity to observe collection items with pupils from Stratford School Academy. This firsthand experience in the after-school club, witnessing how children immersed themselves in the exploration of collection items, made me reflect on the learning process. As an education student, I was then led to the philosophical debate of the relationship between learning and fun – are the two elements separate or could they be mutual–facilitating? To me, real learning experiences are so closely intertwined with ‘fun’. The after-school club facilitated by Special Collections managed to achieve this – Illustrate! provides pupils with a well-balanced educational experience as it supports pupils’ learning with collection items while stimulating the intrinsic curiosity of pupils.

Inspired by our experiences, Yunrui and I seized the opportunity to design our own after-school club – Poetry Lab. Motivated by our fascination with the poetry store, we envisioned a space where Key Stage 3 pupils could discover poetry beyond its stereotypical image. This was inspired by Liz Lawes, when we were introduced to the small press collections. Through sessions focused on concrete, visual, object, and sound poetry, we wanted to encourage pupils to understand poetry as a way of creative expression. We also designed creative activities in each session. These activities would allow kids to construct different forms of poetry by themselves, aiming to help them develop a deeper appreciation of poetry and language. This experience gave us a real taste of programme development including collection use and resource preparation.

To sum up, Yunrui and I have both really enjoyed this placement in the lovely working environment in Special Collections. Our collaboration has been particularly rewarding, with our shared enthusiasm and teamwork spirit. Throughout our placement, we had the pleasure of meeting great people and developing new skills. We sincerely hope there will be future opportunities for us to work with Special Collections again!

The front cover of UCL Special Collections’ edition of Heinz Gappmayr – 5 Papierskulpturen (1962).

The sculptures assembled.

Yunrui Zhang

This term, as a part of Education Placement Module, my course mate Ella and I have been assigned to have a 50-hour placement with UCL Special Collections and worked with the outreach team on the after-school workshop. The placement started at late January and mostly finished at late March. Before this placement, I knew nothing about UCL Special Collections. Through this placement, I gained some relevant knowledge. This includes what archives, rare books and manuscripts are, how to quickly search items in Special Collection’s catalogue and how to use these items in after-school workshops in the Outreach programme.

Our final task was to design an after-school workshop for the outreach programme, using collection items from UCL Special Collections. This required us to have clear knowledge and become relatively familiar with some of the collections. Initially, I thought it would be quite challenging to familiarise ourselves with the collections and develop a suitable workshop topic within the 50-hour placement. However, the supportive environment at UCL Special Collections and the guidance we received, including weekly explorations of different collections, have made the process more manageable. One particularly memorable experience was our visit to the poetry store with Liz Lawes. We were fascinated by the diverse ways in which poetry can be presented. With Liz’s guidance, we deepened our understanding of different forms of poetry and ultimately decided on the topic of our after-school workshop: “the poetry lab”.

Beyond visiting and exploring various collections, we also had the opportunity to observe after-school workshops in person. These experiences taught us a lot about the ideal format for such workshops. Unlike traditional school classes, after-school workshops should integrate fun and interactive activities into the learning process to ensure an enjoyable experience.

These insights have also inspired the design of our own after-school workshop. We’ve structured it into 5 sessions, each focusing on a different form of poetry. This allows students to learn and understand the different forms of poetic expression during the workshop. We have designed different activities for each session to encourage active participation and deeper understanding. For example, one of our sessions is focusing on object poetry. The activity we designed for this session involves students making their own object poetry and sharing their thinking with the class. This hands-on approach can facilitate their understanding on how object works as a metaphor to help people better visualize and understand the poem.

In fact, my learning journey has already begun when I started learning about the Outreach programme. Over the two months of the placement, as I gradually deepened my understanding of the Outreach programme, I gained some new insights about the role of universities in society. I realized that universities could have profound impact beyond their traditional academic roles to foster a more interconnected and supportive society. UCL Special Collections can be a good example that extends the university’s reach beyond its immediate academic community by providing assistance and resources to schools and individuals, actively contributing to broader societal well-being.

Throughout the whole placement, I also learned a lot from my course mate Ella, including her outstanding communication skills and her ability to learn new things. It was a great pleasure to work with her on our after-school workshop proposal. At the same time, I am also very grateful to Vicky Price and Daniel Dickins and everyone else in UCL Special Collections for their help and support during the placement. This experience will be a treasure for my future, and I am very lucky to be able to spend these two months with UCL Special Collections.

Moschatel Press’ Pastoral Fragments, held at UCL Special Collections.

University College London (UCL) Special Collections and the Orwell Youth Prize team up to offer one-of-a-kind Summer School!

Applications are now open for a very special Summer School at UCL in July 2022. Year 12s based in London are invited to join Special Collections and The Orwell Youth Prize to develop their investigative writing skills, encounter first hand stories of journalism from the past and present and meet present-day journalists who are at the forefront of their profession.

Up to 25 participants will attend a range of seminars, study sessions, writing workshops and trips that will shed light on the life of professional journalists. They will develop their own writing with support from professional journalists, who will offer advice and share their experiences. They will also learn how the work of one of the UK’s most famous journalists, George Orwell, has influenced modern day writing and thought. During the Summer School, participants will have access to Orwell’s original notes, letters and diaries in the UNESCO listed George Orwell Archive held at UCL Special Collections.

Year 12 participants at a previous UCL Special Collections Summer School.

The Summer School will take place for one week, from Monday 25 July to Friday 29 July, 10.00am – 4.00pm, and participants will be expected to attend every day.

Apply now to:
• Learn from the best; meet current day journalists who will share tips, techniques and stories from today’s real life news desks.
• Write your own journalistic piece, which will be published online by UCL Special Collections.
• Get hands-on experiences with original archive items from UCL Special Collections, including the UNESCO registered Orwell Archive.

This Summer School is suitable for a wide variety of students who are currently in Year 12 at a London state-funded school, particularly those interested in English, History, Politics, Language, Culture and Anthropology. Anyone applying should currently be studying at least one of these subjects at A level: English Literature, English Language, Politics, History.

This is a non-residential Summer School, meaning that participants will need to commute to and from UCL’s campus each day.  Applications close at midnight on Sunday 12 June 2022.

If you have any queries about the Summer School or would like support with completing your application please email us at library.spec.coll.ed@ucl.ac.uk or call 07741671329.

Who are We?

The Orwell Youth Prize is an independent charity that sits under the auspices of the Orwell Foundation. It is a social justice-based writing programme rooted in Orwell’s values of integrity and fairness that introduces young people to the power of language and provokes them to think critically and creatively about the world in which they are living. The prize is driven by an understanding of social and educational disadvantage in the UK and works closely with schools and individuals to deliver an annual educational programme.

University College London’s Special Collections manages an outstanding collection of rare books, archives and manuscripts, dating from the 4th century to the present day. Together, the team preserve and conserve the collection and facilitate access through a reader service, academic teaching, digitisation and outreach. The Outreach programme aims to create inspiring educational activities for audiences who would not otherwise access the university’s special collections in UCL’s neighbouring and home boroughs; Camden, Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Newham and Waltham Forest.

We have been fortunate to host two students on a 50 hour placement from the IOE’s BA in Education Studies, and as their time comes to a close with us, they have written a blog to share their experiences.  Both students spent time learning about the Special Collections department before immersing themselves in the delivery of an Outreach project at UCL Academy – an after school club called Illustrate! which explores the use of illustration in our collection of rare books, archives and manuscripts.

Eric Xu

As part of the IOE’s Education Studies Placement Module, my course mate Duke and I have been working with Vicky Price as part of UCL Special Collections’ outreach team on the after-school workshop: Illustrate. I had a keen interest not only in working with students in a visual art focused workshop, but also in the collection itself after seeing items from the Orwell Collection around UCL’s campus. Our placement began in early January when we met with Vicky for the first time online. As the weeks went by, Duke and I had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with the people and places of Special collections, and learning about the processes of archiving, cataloguing, digitisation and of course the outreach of the collection.

Our work on Illustrate began promptly in the first weeks, reviewing the past workshop deliveries, and taking inspiration from curated catalogues of the collection. Trying to come up with original ideas of how to integrate collection items into fun and fruitful activities for the students was definitely a challenge, but Duke and I were able to come up with and produce resources for sessions which we were keen to deliver ourselves. Creating these lesson plans and resources was a much more multifaceted task than I had anticipated, the considerations of how students react to your information and questions greatly influences and informs the direction of the class, and having Vicky help us with leading the direction of these disseminations was very helpful and eye-opening. Similarly with the resources and activities, I found that oftentimes I had to give the activity a go myself to determine the difficulty and viability of it for the class, which meant a lot of the times that I had to adjust or even change the resource entirely. Ultimately, the final product of the workshops we delivered were much different and more refined than the initial plans that Duke and I had drawn up.

Working with the students at UCL Academy was also an experience that has reshaped my perspective on professionalism in schools. There were many hurdles we had to hop, both expected and unexpected, including uncertainty with the number of students coming into the workshop. The students that did consistently come every week were lovely to work with, not only were they respectful and interested to learn, but they were also amazing at drawing. Trying to keep every student up to pace with one another and engaging all of them in the content was another struggle that Duke and I faced, and we realised that sometimes it’s impossible to have everyone interested or fully committed in participating, but again with Vicky’s assistance, the workshops still ran successfully.

Overall, the experience for me was an amazing and insightful experience into the organisational operation of UCL Special Collections, the preparation of workshops and resources as well as the teaching of students. I would highly recommend anyone interested to get involved, and I’m very grateful to have worked with Vicky and UCL Special Collections as part of my placement.

Drawing activity designed by Eric and Duke based on the sketch from the Penrose Papers (below).

A sketch of a ‘continuous staircase’, much like the work of Escher, taken from the Penrose Papers at UCL Special Collections.

Duke Li

This term, the placement module from BA Education Studies offered us an opportunity to be involved in the outreach team of UCL Special Collections and the project “Illustrate”. To be specific, the aim of the project was to give the knowledge of special collections items to an audience with a non-academic background. It was really great to bring out activities to the after-school club and have interactions with students on the topic of special collections.

Our experiences started with the introduction of the UCL Special Collections team. Before that, I didn’t know that the UCL Special Collection team involved so many departments. For instance, we took several visits to the UCL Science Library and “hidden rooms” in the IOE building in order to see parts of the collection. It is always exciting to see those rare collection items – archives, rare books, and manuscripts – especially in a storage space that adds a mystery to it. As the placement went by, we got to know how to search items in the Special Collections catalogue, learn about the digitalization of the special collections items, and the process of getting access to items in the reading room. We also had a chance to take a look at an exhibition of the collection. From my perspective, those activities helped me to get a better idea of how the UCL Special Collections team work and cooperates with each other, and the experiences that I got turned out to be helpful when conducting the “Illustrate” project in the later weeks.

As well as intaking this knowledge, we also managed to bring out two sessions to the students on topics related to the collection items. The “Illustrate” project was an after-school class for the students, but the participants all engaged and learned from the discussion and the drawing activities in their own ways. Most of them were really active and willing to interact with us. It’s really delightful when giving out sessions and making students involved in the class. Though the teaching experience was wonderful, we do have several aspects to reflect on.

1. The teaching experiences
In the first session, we designed the whole activity on the work of Escher and his impossible world. We also set questions to ask the students. However, since we didn’t notice the difficulty and the linkage between questions, some of the students may have felt it hard to follow these ideas. From this, we concluded that the questions should be more carefully designed to express less in-depth, but easy-to-follow ideas, or else the knowledge of the collection items can not be promoted. Luckily, the final outcomes of the drawing activities turned out to be a big success, due to the creativity of the students. They have their own designs and thoughts.

2. The external factors
We also encounter some problems with the project as a whole. Since the project was an afterschool class in the school, schools may pay less attention to our project than the school’s wider teaching and learning activity. This may be the reason that most of the time, we did not have a lot of participants for our sessions. Also, we experienced once that the school was closed due to a problem with their water supply, but we only find out that when we arrived there, so these factors may have affected the teaching quality as well as the experience of teaching and learning.

To conclude, the whole placement experience is really great, we got the chance to know the UCL Special Collection team and how a team like this operates. The teaching experience with students was always nice since they were all really engaged. Also, we were really interested by the idea of the outreach team’s work when we were trying to make linkage between the non-academic audience and the special collection items that deserve to be noticed by more people. It was a really nice experience and I learned and reflected a lot.

The Huguenot Library holds the archives of the French Protestant School of Westminster.

The school was founded in 1747 by a group of wealthy Huguenots who became increasingly concerned about the fate of the Huguenot orphans sent to workhouses or growing up illiterate and without any form of education. The institution they planned to create would feed and clothe the children, teach them basic numerical skills, how to read and write in French and English, sing the Psalms, and provide them with a sound religious instruction. Furthermore, the girls would be taught to sew and knit their own clothes as well as the boys’. In order to attend the school one had to provide proof of either being a French Protestant or being a descendant of one. As a result, baptism certificates, parents’ marriage certificates and information on Huguenot descent are often available in the students’ files.

Baptism certificate of Jacques Bellanger, 6 June 1778.

The institution occupied two houses in Windmill Street, near Tottenham Court Road, until 1846, when it moved to a newly built house in Plumtree Street, next to the French Savoy Church. The number of pupils in the school varied throughout the years, mainly depending on the sums that could be raised from the institution’s benefactors. Generally, about thirty students divided in equal numbers between boys and girls were admitted up to 1813. At this date, the financial difficulties that recurrently plagued the school from its creation, intensified. Therefore, the Directors decided to close the boys’ section, sublet one of the houses occupied by the former students and dismiss the Master, whose services were no longer required. The change is illustrated in the surviving receipts, which went from depicting a boy and a girl wearing uniforms to two girls.

Receipt to Lady Ravensworth, on engraved form showing a boy and girl, 1791.

Unused receipt form showing two girls, post 1813.

This drastic measure was just the last in a series of decisions aimed at reducing expenses, such as buying poorer quality bread and changing the girls uniform from blue to the cheaper grey fabric. This was more hard-felt than it would initially appear, as the institution was known in the Huguenot community as the ‘Blue Coat School’.

The minutes shed light on some of the students’ misbehaviour, such as hitting one of the teachers, in 1783; burying letters in the fields instead of delivering them, in 1793, and climbing on the church’s roof next to the school, in 1868. In 1783, a number of boys managed to throw stones and break one of the neighbouring property’s windows, whilst the Directors were meeting and witnessed the entire event. One wonders if the students were rather unlucky or very brazen! The entry in the minutes pictured below recalls the event, as well as the punishment imposed.

Minutes of the Directors’ meetings, 25 October 1783

Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that the institution had a good reputation and was well liked. It is indeed common to see several generations of the same family attending it.

The main aim of the school was to enable the children to become apprentices when they left at 14. This was achieved successfully and many of the boys were given apprenticeships in trades typical of the Huguenot community, such as tailors, cobblers, weavers, jewellers and watch makers. Many of the girls would, on the other hand, be placed in domestic service, or as lace-makers, menders and dressmakers.

The school finally closed in 1924.

More information about it can be found in three articles published in the Proceedings of the Huguenot Society: William Morris Beaufort, ‘Records of the French Protestant School, founded by Huguenot refugees, 1747’, vol. IV, and Susan Minet, ‘Ecole de Charité Française de Westminster’, vols XII and XIII.

The school’s archives are fully catalogued online here. Researchers can arrange to access the collection by contacting the Huguenot Library here.

January is always a good time to reflect on our achievements and look forward to our upcoming plans and projects. Read on to discover some of the Outreach team’s highlights from last year’s Special Collection’s schools programmes – and what to expect from them next…

Teacher CPD with First Story

Helen Biggs from UCL Special Collections and Jay Bhadricha from First Story preparing for the visiting teachers.

Last year we built on our valuable relationship with the charity First Story to devise a CPD event for GCSE English Language teachers.  The event sought to help teachers develop ways of enabling pupils to write creatively on topics they know little, or nothing, about (in response to current GCSE examination expectations), using Special Collection items as examples of prompts.

We’re running this event again (only bigger and better!) on the evening of Tuesday 19 March. If you are a Secondary school English teacher and would like to attend, you can get tickets here.

Curriculum Support for Secondary Schools

Our vision for 2019 is to develop school relationships in a strategic way.  We want to reach as many young people as we can, sharing the incredible collection that we look after, with meaningful, enriching experiences; one way to do this is to develop a ‘menu’ of curriculum relevant workshops that schools can book with us.

We have a team of volunteer researchers helping us to find unique items that are relevant to curriculum areas and once we have made the resources and planned the workshops we will pilot them with the schools with whom we have a close working relationship.

A slide from the PowerPoint for the Year 11 session on Stevenson’s ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’. It features a section of a Toxicology lecture from UCL (Christison, Robert, 1831, Christison Lecture Notes, MS ADD 316) regarding gentlemen’s recreational experimentation with Cyanide. This was found by a volunteer researcher.

An example is our session for GCSE pupils that explores the context of Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

We recently piloted it with Year 11s at East London Science School.

We have also developed a workshop on the context of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  Our vast collections covering British and European medical history have meant the session features unique resources; surprise and intrigue abounds in Year 10 classrooms as they learn about the practice of body-snatching, and just why Carswell’s drawings are so important!

School 21: Real World Learning

For the second year running, we are working with School21 in Newham to participate in their Real World Learning programme. This provides both students and their host workplaces with something that is more meaningful and authentic than a traditional work experience programme. For a term, two Year 12s are spending half a day each week with UCL Special Collections, solving an authentic problem for the department.

Last year’s participants worked to develop a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds to conserve and digitise selections from UCL’s collection of student magazines (from the College Archive).  We’re excited to see what their successors Munna and Umar will do this year; we have given them the task of creating welcome resources for a new landing page on our website.

UCL Special Collections Summer School – Protest in Print

After the success of 2018’s UCL Special Collections Summer School, we are happy to announce that we were successful in our bid to Widening Participation to run another programme this summer.

Work produced by students at last year’s Summer School, focussing on an item from the Small Press Collection

This year we are taking inspiration from the Slade Small Press project Visions of Protest, which aims to provide a forum to examine the status of contemporary protest in Small Press Publications. UCL Special Collections’ Summer School, Protest in Print, will be a smaller, more compact and easier to access iteration of this.

Protest in Print will offer participants an opportunity to be creative and hands on, applying what they learn about small press publications (such as those in the Little Magazines and Alternative Press collections) archives and rare books in practical ways.  The result will be a public exhibition of their work alongside a display of examples of collection items that have inspired their work in the South Junction Reading Room – watch this space for dates and times!

Shrouds of the Somme
The biggest achievement of the Autumn Term was also undoubtedly our highest profile project to date: working as partners in the Shrouds of the Somme installation at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, alongside other organisations such as the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the London Legacy Development Corporation.  We delivered an education programme to schools in the Park’s neighbouring boroughs, reaching almost 1000 pupils.   We wrote a blog about this project as part of our department’s Advent Calendar – to read more, click here.

Text by Helen Biggs and Vicky Price.

We are excited to announce UCL Special Collections’ newest addition to the outreach and education programme – our first Summer School programme, in August 2018!

We will be offering 14 Year 12 students a chance to learn about all things special collections – from what we keep, why we keep it, how we keep it and how our collections can be significant to an array of audiences.

Funded by Widening Participation, the four day programme will make good use of our wonderful host city; we will explore how special collections items are interpreted and displayed at The National Archives (at their exciting current exhibition Suffragettes vs.The City) and The British Library.

Our team of specialists will offer guidance and advice as participants explore the notion of authenticity in interpretation, and participants will experiment with applying what they have learnt to some chosen manuscripts, rare books and archival items at UCL.

The final result will be an exhibition that presents students’ own responses, in a variety of formats and genres, alongside the items themselves. The exhibition will take place in UCL’s South Junction Reading Room on August 9th from 2pm to 4pm – it will be free and open to the public, so please come along!*

*Visitors are invited to pop in at any time between 2pm and 4pm.  Should the room become full we might ask you to wait a short while before entry, due to space restrictions.

“Nativity”, in: R 221 DICTIONARIES DYC 1748: Dyche, A new general English dictionary (London, 1748)

A substantial amount of Special Collections’ work is in teaching and teaching support across a broad range of subjects: classics, law, library studies, architecture, history, maths – the list goes on. Sometimes this is a single class on using historical and primary materials, but this may also be a series of sessions, as with the Archival Research and Oral History in Education (AROHE) module, taught at UCL Institute of Education.

This year AROHE students have explored the topics of international education, special educational needs, progressive education and multi-racial education, using items from Newsam Archives, to focus on areas like visual sources, curriculum, biography and learners’ voices.

One of the visual sources picked out by students was this photo from the Amelia Fysh collection:

©UCL Institute of Education Archives [AF/1/3/A/25]

Although they weren’t given any contextual or identifying information about the photography, it was immediately recognised as a school nativity play. Mary, Joseph and chorus of angels were all correctly identified, and after some discussion, so were the Three Wise Men and the shepherds. (The shepherds are very well dressed; fortuitously, the Three Wise Men can be distinguished by their crowns.)

However, when it came to dating the photograph, the students came somewhat unstuck. The wearing of costumes make it impossible to use fashion to estimate when the photograph was taken, and likewise most of the children’s heads are covered, so nor can their hair styles be used as a guide. In the end, it was suggested that the photo was probably “old”, because it was black and white.

This gave me something of a shock. Not the assertion itself; it may have been a little misguided (black and white film is still in use today, not to mention the black and white or sepia filters of digital photography!) but learning how to draw on others’ research, context clues and our own personal knowledge to understand objects is at the very heart of using archive materials. No – what stunned me was the realisation that many of today’s students are too young to recognise the product of a 1990’s style black-and-white photocopier…

In case you’re wondering – the image is from a booklet from Beech Green Nursery School, featuring photos from 1956-1973 (the booklet itself was created in 2002). Whether you think this can be considered “old” or not is up to you – although colour photography was definitely around by the 1950’s!

Kate, Jacinta and Suad explore the archives at the IOE

We were honoured to play host to three young visitors this month, who spent some time learning about what it means to work at UCL’s Special Collections, Archives and Records department and at the UCL Institute of Education’s Library.

Jacinta (15), Suad (17) and Kate (17) came to us from schools in Southwark, Yorkshire and Camden respectively, and they brought with them a range of skills, interests and aspirations that made them real assets to our team during their time with us.

Their timetables included assisting at the Library Services staff conference, helping deliver an adult learners outreach workshop Camden, assisting Francesca Ezzelino at the IOE with checking a substantial number of DERA records and helping to move part of the IOE’s Official Publications collection so that some sections have room to grow.
They also wrote a blog post, each focussing on a chosen aspect of their placement, which you can find below.

Thank you to all the staff members who spent time with Jacinta, Suad and Kate – it was of real benefit to them to learn about your roles.

Jacinta: My First Days at UCL
On my 4th day at UCL Special Collections, Archives and Records I helped at the same session of a conference twice, in the morning from 10:45 until lunch time. I really enjoyed it at the end because lots of jokes were being made which made it funny to watch as well as listen to, and I ended up having to contain my manic laugh so I didn’t frighten the audience.
After lunch I went to a Japanese block printing session with my supervisor Vicky Price. I got engaged in it eventually and it was pretty fun until I cut my finger (unintentionally) with my Stanley knife (oops)…

The Great Wave Off Kanagawa by Hokusai

This fortnight was overall really interesting for me to experience what it’s really like in a workplace, and to learn the ways of the library and how to treat the special collections and archives. I found it fascinating to learn about people in the past and read their journals and diaries in the reading room, also finding out what it was like for people (mostly women) to cope in that day and age. It was quite enraging to look at all the rules that women had to follow and the misogyny and allegations that they had to deal with and face.

Suad: Worthy work experience
Work experience is a crucial part of a student’s life as it provides both experience into the working field and fun, depending on where you are placed. I cleverly chose to work with UCL Special Collections, Archives and Records, Library Services.

One of our activities consisted of helping Vicky to investigate further into the women’s position during and post-war. I may say that it was mind-blowing! Witnessing how letters were written to one another using typewriters and the multiple mistakes that were made, made me realise how lucky we are to now have a decent keyboard. I say decent but I really mean spectacular! It’s amazing how there is a huge difference from when you’re told about history and important figures as to when you have items written by a witness. It really is eye opening and in my opinion, this the best way a student can widen their understanding.

I took part in a library exploration where I had to locate 12 books across two libraries. At first it was confusing as you had many codes to look at and different floors or different areas to go to, but as the time went on I got the hang of it. I managed to locate 10/12 which was pretty impressive.

The Main Library

To sum my experience here at UCL Libraries, I can definitely say that it was an absorbing, thrilling and worthy work experience that any student should take upon.

Kate: Inspecting Archives of the NUWT
Throughout my A-level career, I would like to believe I have learned a substantial amount about women’s fight for equal rights. However, my eyes weren’t truly opened until I had the opportunity to peruse a collection from the Institute of Education’s archives. The most important thing I learned was that the battle for equality didn’t stop at gaining the vote.

I stumbled upon letters concerning the struggle of women being ignored and ridiculed in the Commons, including a complaint of politician, Sir William Lane Mitchell, that women gave teachers a bad name due to their rallying for more rights! (I, too, was appalled).  However, the collection was not all struggle and strife. I had the fortune to come across a heartening advertisement for all women teachers to come along to the Commons and lobby (and to have a ‘good tea’ beforehand), encouraging women to get their voices heard.

When thinking of the First World War, people seem to immediately think of men fighting on the front line, without taking into consideration the role women played in the effort. This included resuming the job vacancies left behind, working in factories and hospitals for the wounded or even baking cakes for those on the front line!

Rifling through these archives gave me a deeper awareness of the often overlooked, yet extremely vital role women have played in history, and gave me a deeper appreciation of the struggle they have gone through and continue to go through for equality.

One of the annual highlights of SCAR’s outreach work is our participation in First Story’s Creative Writing Day, which this year saw almost 100 pupils from six London schools descend upon UCL’s museums and library collections to attend workshops run by professional writers.

In late February, poet Miriam Nash ran a session for 17 students from St Mary’s and St John’s CE School, exploring how books interact with our five senses, and inspiring participants to create new pieces of writing based on their interactions with rare books and manuscripts from Special Collections.

While the books on offer included Hooke’s Micrographia and an emblem book formerly owned by Ben Jonson, it was the 1493 Liber chronicarum which really caught the visitors’ attention. Better known as the Nuremberg Chronicle, the encyclopaedia-like book mingles legend, religion and fact to present a historical narrative which is very different from any that we’re familiar with today. This led students to pose the philosophical question: was the writer of the Nuremberg Chronicle lying, if he really believed the myths he wrote about were true?

Learning about the strange creatures described in the Nuremberg Chronicles

Attitudes on the day ranged from quietly interested to loudly enthused, with students enjoying both the chance to see these rare items up close and to write and share their own work. Or, as one attendee put it,

“It was very entertaining and areas of my brain I never knew existed before were unlocked today! I loved it!”

It was easy to be impressed with what the pupils produced: stories about strange creatures with feet for heads, poetry offering soberingly mature love advice, and writing that went into microscopic details.  While the day may have aimed to motivate young people with objects they had never seen before, the talent and intelligence of these young authors was in itself inspiring to the library staff in attendance.

First Story works to nurture the creative writing skills of young people by linking schools in low-income areas with professional writers, to help pupils discover and foster their talents.