Master in Libraries, Archives and Digital Continuity postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The folder was called final_FINAL2, and it held the only scanned copy of a tenancy agreement from 2014. I found it in my second month as an administrator at a lettings agency, while a landlord waited on the phone for proof of a deposit arrangement. Next to it were final.pdf, final_FINAL.pdf and a Word file that would not open. That afternoon made me realise that a record can exist and still be practically lost. It is also why I want to study libraries, archives and digital continuity at postgraduate level.

My degree in History and Spanish gave me a reader's respect for documents. For my dissertation I worked with a run of newsletters produced by a housing cooperative in the 1970s, held by a local studies library. I was interested in how members argued about repairs and rent, but I became just as interested in the newsletters as objects. Some issues had been typed, others duplicated on a stencil machine, and a few survived only as photocopies donated decades later by a former member. Comparing them, I noticed that two issues carried different dates for the same meeting. Working out which was the later correction depended on paper, typeface and handwritten notes. These details are often removed when material is reduced to text for researchers. The librarian who helped me explained how the collection had been catalogued and why some items were described only at folder level. I learned that description is a series of practical decisions about time and use, not a neutral act.

At work, I applied a version of that thinking to the agency's shared drive. With my manager's agreement, I proposed a naming convention based on property reference, document type and date. I wrote a one-page guide and spent several quiet Friday afternoons renaming and checking around nine hundred files. I also listed documents in formats our current software could not open reliably and asked colleagues which ones still mattered legally. It was a modest project, and a professional archivist would have done it more systematically. Even so, the team now finds documents faster, and I discovered that I enjoy work where accuracy depends on agreed habits rather than individual memory.

Wanting to understand the field properly, I began reading about the Open Archival Information System reference model. Its distinction between submission, archival and dissemination information packages helped me see what my office project lacked. We had made files easier to find, but we had not recorded what had been changed, by whom, or why. I have since read introductory material on PREMIS preservation metadata. I would like to understand how institutions record that kind of provenance at scale, and how they decide which significant properties of a file must survive migration.

Outside work I develop black-and-white film at home and scan the negatives. I keep a simple log of film stock, developer and scan settings, partly from habit and partly because I have learned that a scan without context is hard to interpret later. I also sing in a community choir, where I look after the shared box of sheet music. I record who has borrowed what and replace pages that have gone soft with use. Neither activity is professional, but both involve caring for materials so that other people can use them.

I am drawn to a course that treats libraries, archives and digital records together, because the problems I have met cross those boundaries. I hope to develop the technical and theoretical grounding to make records last and remain understandable, and eventually to work in an archive or records management service where that work is valued.