Library and Archive Studies MA postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The slide was labelled in pencil on its cardboard mount: 'Mill Lane, after the water, Dad on left.' Nobody at the local history society knew whose dad, or which flood. Over two Saturday afternoons I compared the rooflines in the image with dated photographs in the society's collection and narrowed it to the winter of 1968. I added that date to our spreadsheet as an estimate, with my reasoning in a separate notes column, because I did not want a guess to harden into a fact for the next person who searched the record. That small decision about how to record uncertainty is much of why I want to study library and archive work formally.

I graduated last year with a 2:1 in English Literature and Geography. My dissertation examined how a rural parish council responded to repeated flooding between 1947 and 1970, using its handwritten minute books held at the county record office. I learned to request items in advance, to work within reading room rules, and to read the minutes for what was not written as well as what was. Resolutions were recorded but disagreements rarely were, so I compared the minutes with letters in the local newspaper to reconstruct the debate. The archivist helped me understand why the minute books had survived while the clerk's correspondence had not, and that conversation made me think about collections as the result of choices and accidents rather than as neutral stores of the past.

Since graduating I have worked full time in an independent bookshop. Much of my job involves special orders, which means turning vague requests into identifiable items: a customer wants 'the blue book about Lancashire canals from the nineties', and I search distributor databases by keyword, date and publisher until we find an edition that fits. I have built a simple shared log so colleagues can see what has been ordered, chased or cancelled, and the number of orders we lose track of has fallen noticeably. The work has given me practical respect for metadata. A missing ISBN or an inconsistent author name can make a book effectively invisible.

For the past eighteen months I have volunteered with the history society, indexing around four hundred slides donated by a former member. Following guidance the society adapted from published cataloguing advice, I record location, approximate date, subjects and condition, and I flag slides showing identifiable people so the committee can consider permissions before anything is put online. I am not a conservator, and I have learned to recognise when to stop and ask, for instance when I found slides with mould spotting and isolated them rather than cleaning them myself.

My reading has followed these experiences. Laura Millar's Archives: Principles and Practices gave me a vocabulary for provenance and original order that I had been groping towards when sorting the slides. I am also interested in debates about description and whose language appears in catalogues, particularly how place names and community terms change over time, which my Geography training made me alert to.

Outside work I play badminton in a club league and help organise our fixture rota, a modest but real exercise in keeping records that other people depend on.

Postgraduate study would give me the theoretical grounding and professional standards that my practical experience lacks: cataloguing and classification, records management, digital preservation and the ethics of access. I would particularly like to explore how small community collections can be described consistently enough to be discoverable without losing the local knowledge that makes them meaningful. I bring patience with detail, experience of public-facing work, and a habit of recording not only what I know but how I know it.