Archives and records management postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in archives grew out of the practical problem of not being able to read what I had been given. For my undergraduate dissertation I compared how two Yorkshire parishes recorded relief for widowed women between 1850 and 1880, which meant three months of reading-room visits, a palaeography handbook and a lot of squinting at overseers' accounts on microfilm. What stayed with me afterwards was not only the evidence I found but the shape of the collection itself: the gaps where minute books had been lost, the catalogue descriptions that told me who had deposited the records and when, and the way a reference number could carry the whole logic of a diocesan filing system. I began to see the finding aid as an argument about the records rather than a neutral list, and I wanted to understand how those arguments are made.

Since graduating I have worked as an administrator for a housing charity, and that job has taught me more about records management than I expected. I look after tenancy and support files that contain a good deal of sensitive personal information, and part of my role is applying the retention schedule: identifying what must be kept for audit or legal reasons, what can be destroyed, and what has been quietly duplicated across three shared drives because nobody agreed on naming conventions. Last year I rewrote our folder structure and drafted a one-page guide so that new staff file consistently, and I now sit in on the quarterly data protection review. Dealing with subject access requests has made the balance between access and confidentiality concrete for me: I have had to decide what can reasonably be redacted when a file mentions third parties, and to explain those decisions plainly to colleagues.

My reading has followed these two strands. Elizabeth Shepherd and Geoffrey Yeo's Managing Records gave me vocabulary for what I was doing instinctively at work, particularly around appraisal and the idea that records need context to remain meaningful. Terry Cook's writing on appraisal and the shift away from purely custodial thinking helped me see why decisions about what to keep are professional and contestable rather than administrative. I follow the Archives and Records Association's journal and blog posts where I can, and I have become interested in digital preservation, especially the problem of file formats and born-digital email collections, which is where my current workplace knowledge runs out.

Outside work I transcribe my grandmother's family papers: letters, a wartime ration book, loose photographs with names on the back in at least three different hands. I have built a simple spreadsheet recording date, correspondent, condition and provenance, and I have learned to resist rearranging bundles into the order I would find convenient. I also keep the fixture and scorebook records for a local cricket club, which sounds trivial but involves the same questions of consistency, legibility and whether anyone will be able to use them in twenty years.

I am applying for postgraduate study because I want the professional grounding I cannot get from reading alone: cataloguing standards, digital preservation practice, and the legislative framework that sits behind decisions I currently make by instinct. My longer-term hope is to work in a local authority or university archive service, where I would enjoy the mixture of technical description work and helping researchers who arrive, as I did, unsure how to begin.

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