Master of Archival Studies and Master of Library and Information Studies (MASLIS) postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The rowing club where I volunteer kept its history in three cardboard boxes under the boathouse stairs. When the committee asked me to sort them before a refurbishment, I expected a weekend's work. It took most of a winter. Of roughly six hundred photographs, fewer than a third had any writing on the back, and several albums had been taken apart and refilled by different people over the decades, so the order of the prints told me more about who had last tidied them than about when they were taken. I built a spreadsheet, recorded what each item was and where I had found it before moving anything, and asked older members to help identify faces at two Sunday sessions. Being careful about the difference between what I knew and what I was guessing turned out to matter more than speed. That project is the most direct reason I want to train in both archival studies and library and information studies.

My undergraduate degree in History gave me my first sustained contact with original records. My dissertation examined poor relief in a market town in the 1820s using vestry minutes held at the county record office. The minutes were patchy, and I learned to read them alongside overseers' accounts to work out what the clerk had chosen to leave out. I became as interested in how the volumes had survived, been rebound and been described in the catalogue as in the decisions they recorded. A catalogue entry that dated one volume to the wrong decade sent me down a false trail for a fortnight. It made me realise that description shapes what researchers can find and believe.

For the past three years I have worked as a library assistant at a busy public branch library. Much of the job is ordinary and necessary: issuing and returning stock, processing reservations, helping people print boarding passes or fill in benefit forms online. I have also come to run our fortnightly family history drop-in, which began as a quiet corner with two subscription databases. I now prepare short guides on census records and civil registration indexes, and I spend a lot of time explaining why a search returns nothing when a surname has been spelled four different ways. Watching people struggle with interfaces that assume they already know how records are arranged has made me think about access as a design problem, not only a matter of opening hours.

This is why a combined course appeals to me rather than either discipline alone. In the library I see the user's side: the person with a half-remembered name and limited time. In the archive and the boathouse I have seen the material's side: context, provenance and gaps that cannot be filled. I want to understand the principles behind both, including how archival arrangement differs from bibliographic classification and where metadata standards help or flatten local knowledge. Reading Laura Millar's Archives: Principles and Practices helped me put names to things I had been doing by instinct, such as preserving original order where it exists and documenting my own interventions where it does not.

Outside work I cycle long distances at weekends and keep a simple log of routes, which my friends tease me about. I am comfortable with spreadsheets and basic database work, and I am learning more about digital preservation because the club's recent photographs exist only on members' phones, which is a different kind of box under the stairs.

I would bring patience with messy records, experience of helping members of the public with genuine information needs, and a habit of documenting my reasoning. I hope to develop the theoretical grounding and technical skills to do this work properly, in a setting where both collections and their users are taken seriously.