Work-based Placement – Chloé
By Chloé Pasquetti-Barbera
From January to April 2024, I had the pleasure of doing a work-based placement at the St Andrews Heritage Museum and Garden as part of my MLitt in Museum and Heritage Studies. The experience proved to be a great opportunity as the museum was (and still is) undergoing a redevelopment project. Projects of this scale are a rare and important occurrence in a museum’s life, and I was lucky to be involved in this one.
My role as “project collections assistant” was to support the museum redevelopment project team in collections care and collections management during the museum decant. The first half of my placement consisted of packing the collections, filling out location cards and organising the objects into boxes ready to be transported to the store. I enjoyed being able the handle the various objects, especially since the prospect of being in direct contact with the collections was what drew me in when I applied for the placement.
Once the collections had all been packed and moved to the store, I moved on to updating the objects’ location on the Collection Management System Modes. I had never used Modes before, so this was a good way to develop a new skill. While the great majority of the objects we had packed were already registered on the system, some of them didn’t have an accession number. So, I spent most of the second half of my placement accessioning these objects. It was a three-step process: starting with filling their entry form, then adding them to the accession register, and finally creating their file on Modes. It taught me about the legal procedure of acquiring and accessioning objects, and once again allowed me to handle the objects. This time I could take time to really observe them, having to describe them with as many details as possible on Modes.
I’m glad I got to do this placement in the context of the redevelopment project because it trained me on the basics of museum practice, developing skills that are needed in any kind of museum holding a collection. Besides the work I was assigned to do, it was very interesting to learn about the different aspects of the redevelopment and to witness the team and the volunteers’ dedication to the project.
Being a Study Abroad student, I also found that working in a museum preserving the social history of St Andrews was a great way to learn more and build a stronger connection with the town.
– Chloé Pasquetti-Barbera