VALUED SERVICES

Library Placements: employability and hands-on experience  

The Library hosted 31 placements at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library and the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre, three times our usual number, to support the MA in Library and Archives Studies. We oversaw 20 projects, including cataloguing colonial educational maps and humanitarian manuals, documenting glass negatives, and compiling a bibliography on early rail travel.  

One such project saw placement students contribute to the Imaging Archive Collection. Six students took part over a four-month period, with each student spending 20 days on the work placement. The students worked alongside Library colleagues to develop knowledge and learn skills in photography, conservation, cataloguing, and metadata for Special Collections, and contributed to the final outputs of the Imaging Archive Collection hosted on Library Digital Collections.  We introduced podcasts and student blog posts as a new way to engage the public.

More details about our student placements can be found on the Rylands blog. The placement module continues to be highly popular, offering students valuable professional experience, along with industry-relevant skills and connections.   

The positive feedback from students on the MA Library and Archives Studies demonstrates the importance of this module.

Placement students gained valuable insight into the many different roles within a leading Higher Education Special Collections Library, from imaging, public engagement, and conservation specialists to more traditional curator roles.

An important element of our MA placements is the annual student symposium at which each student introduces a short presentation on their project to their peers, the MA tutors, and Library colleagues.