Over the summer, four second year medieval and early modern history students carried out internships at the archives of Guildford Cathedral, which is currently in the process of digitising its collection of materials.

Students were involved in tasks such as writing descriptions of images on spreadsheets whilst allocating them catalogue numbers. They also learnt how modern archiving works, including online structures and the labour intensive processes needed to transfer hard copies of historical documents into digital ones.  Such opportunities to work in an historical field are very rare and the students grasped the chance fully and received excellent feedback from the volunteer co-ordinators and archivists at the Cathedral.  

The students David Sugden, Madeline Day, Ella Norris and Amber Li, have all applied to study history or art history at university.  They helped the Cathedral get ahead of its archiving schedule and have been excellent ambassadors for the College and the history department.

The Co-ordinator at Guildford Cathedral commented, “All the students have been great.  They have helped us immensely and we are very grateful for the support.”

Student Madeline Day said, “I found the experience really fun. I thoroughly enjoyed learning how an archive worked and getting to handle historical documents.  It was an amazing experience and I'm really glad I took part!”

Student David Sugden commented, “The internship helped me understand that places such as Guildford Cathedral are lacking the resources and funds to help with preservation, mainly as unlike other Cathedrals, it's relatively modern.  It also taught me lots about how to preserve valuable data as well as being an application of real life history.”