Hello! I’m Rebecca, and I’m the futureArch graduate trainee, based within BEAM (Bodleian Electronic Archives and Manuscripts).
I graduated last year from the University of Leicester, where I studied History. Since then I have worked at a GP surgery and volunteered at Shropshire Archives, where I was involved in a project on some Parish collections. This meant I got to work with a lot of old documents, including the relics of a key member of the early Methodist movement.
My role in futureArch is quite different, as I am dealing with born-digital material: things like websites, emails, Word documents, audio files, and digital photos. This means working with sites on the live web, as well as capturing files off CDs and floppy disks. I am also doing some more traditional archive work, assisting in the Special Collections Reading Room once a week and cataloguing paper collections using EAD. I’m looking forward to learning more about archives over the next year, especially the challenges which digital material presents to archivists.
