A Broad Overview of the Next Few Weeks
Hello everyone!
For those of you who are returning readers, welcome back to the Trainee Blog! We’d like to say a huge thank you for sticking with us over the quietness of the last few weeks. Rest assured, we shall be back to a regular posting schedule shortly. For those of you who are new readers, welcome! We hope that our content over the next academic year will keep you entertained and informed about the Bodleian Libraries and life as a Graduate Trainee.
As you may have seen in the previous post, a new year means a new cohort of trainees – and since there are quite a few of us, it might be a little hard to keep track of us all. As such, we’ve dedicated the next four weeks to doing a few small introductions to ourselves and our roles within the Graduate Trainee Programme. We hope you enjoy!
Evie Morris – Weston Library
My background before I started in the library was mostly in sciences. I have a BSc in Biology and worked as a researcher and ecologist after I graduated. Like so many people, the pandemic completely up-ended my life and for a while I was lost… I worked a range of jobs in the aftermath, but when I got a Saturday job in the local library, it was a real ‘lightbulb moment’- I knew I belonged in the stacks! At heart, I have always been a polymath, and struggled with the ‘one track mind’ one seemed to need to be a successful scientist. But even my eclectic work history hadn’t imbued me with the experience needed for most full-time library jobs. As an undergraduate, whereas history students (and similar) have to use the primary sources contained in the library, everything I wanted as a researcher in genetics came from the internet.
The traineeship was thus my golden ticket and now I work in the Weston Library (or the ‘New Bod’, despite being *checks notes* yep, almost 100 years old) in Archives and Modern Manuscripts, which means working with records created between 1800 to the present day. As libraries and archives begin collecting materials created more recently, a lot is in digital media. Working in digital archives combines my skill set from computing for science research with my passion for expanding the reach of knowledge. It’s exciting to be working in a field where it’s still ‘all to play for’: if and how we decide to preserve these collections now will impact the scholars and combined knowledge of the future.
At the moment my time is split between the Bodleian Web Archive and a project to digitise catalogues, but that’s another blog post.
Lilly Wilcox – Weston Library
Hello world! My name is Lilly Wilcox, and I am one of two graduate trainee digital archivists with Archives and Modern Manuscripts in the Weston Library.
My academic background is in literature and communication studies, with a healthy dose of digital humanities. During my undergraduate, I worked on a digital humanities project that used the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines for XML to make pre-Victorian women’s writing digitally available and facilitate research on underrepresented writers. I found text encoding so fascinating, I moved to Oxford to do my MSc in Digital Scholarship. During my master’s, I got to design my own TEI/XML projects with Taylor Editions—the digital editions publishing platform run by the Taylor Institution Library—and learn about the variety of digital projects happening behind-the-scenes at the Bodleian Libraries. Now working at the Weston, I’ve swapped TEI/XML for EAD/XML (Encoded Archival Description) to support the retro conversion of the Africa & Commonwealth collection’s print handlists to digital catalogues. I also work on web archiving, so that online information about the running of the University in 2024 is preserved and can be made available for research in the future.
Yasmeen Khan – Osney One
Greetings! I’m Yasmeen, the Graduate Trainee Resource Description Assistant for this academic year. If you’re wondering why you’ve never seen a predecessor of mine on the blog, my position was newly created for 2024-25 – so hopefully there will be many more of us to come!
Perhaps predictably for someone on this scheme I have been circling the idea of working with books for long time. Throughout primary and secondary school I could be found volunteering in various libraries, only taking a break when I went to study books for three years as an English undergraduate. Following my graduation, I worked in a boarding school for a year, where I naturally ended up volunteering in the school library (because I am, at the end of the day, a creature of habit). When my contract at that school came to an end, I finally gave in to the inevitable and applied to be the graduate trainee at Osney One, which houses a lot of the behind-the-bookshelves work that keeps the Bodleian running. Now my days are largely filled with tasks such as sending newly acquired books to their required locations, classifying books, and working to cram as much cataloguing theory into my head as possible. But one of the interesting quirks of my role is that I’ll slowly be shuffling from department to department (and occasionally library to library) over the course of the year, meaning that my workload could look entirely different by the time Hilary hits.
So, if you happen to see a member of staff looking entirely baffled by the mere concept of your favourite library’s shelving system later this year, there’s a good chance it could be me – feel free to come over and say hi!
