Archival studies postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My dissertation began with a box that did not match its description. I had asked for the minute books of a Victorian friendly society in a county record office, expecting neat rows of subscriptions, and found instead a run of volumes where the handwriting changed abruptly in 1873, a page had been cut out, and several loose slips had been tucked between pages by someone, at some point, for reasons nobody had recorded. My supervisor was interested in what the society did; I became at least as interested in why the record looked the way it did. That question is what has brought me to apply for postgraduate study in archival studies.

My History degree gave me steady practice in reading records against the grain and in accepting that absence is evidence too. Alongside the dissertation, an optional module on the uses of history introduced me to debates about appraisal and custody, and I have since read Terry Cook's writing on the shift from records as passive evidence to archives as actively shaped by the choices of archivists. I do not pretend to have resolved where I stand on appraisal, but I recognise that the decisions are unavoidable, and I would rather learn to make them carefully and transparently than imagine they can be avoided. I am also keen to work seriously on description standards and on digital records, which my degree barely touched. The collections I have handled so far were paper; the collections I will spend a career with will mostly not be.

For the past year I have volunteered one afternoon a week with a local heritage group that was left a large donation of photographs, parish newsletters and committee papers by the family of a former secretary. I worked with another volunteer on one manageable part of it: roughly four hundred photographs of a single street's shops and houses. We agreed a simple item-level spreadsheet, kept a separate note of guesses so they could not be mistaken for facts, and stopped ourselves reordering anything until we had photographed the sequence as received. About a third of the images are still undated, and I have learned to leave that field empty rather than fill it with an approximation that would harden into a fact. The listing is now used by group members answering enquiries from the public, which felt like a modest but real result.

Independently, I have been working through my grandmother's letters and postcards, mostly wartime and post-war family correspondence. It is an amateur project, but it has taught me practical things: how quickly rubber bands and sellotape do damage, how much context lives in an envelope, and how hard it is to decide what a family collection is actually for. Paid work in a garden centre has been useful in less obvious ways, chiefly in handling enquiries from people who are not sure what they want and need help arriving at a question.

I am looking for training that combines records management and archival theory with hands-on cataloguing, and I would welcome placement work in a local authority service, where the range of material and the pressure on space seem to make the decisions sharpest. My longer-term hope is to work in a county or city archive service, contributing to description and to public access work, and eventually to the appraisal decisions that determine what someone else will open in fifty years' time.

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