World Youth Festival pamphlet, UWT/D/28A/2 ©Institute of Education Archive |
Tuesday 12 April 2011
New Cataloguing Archivist post
I've just started a new job in the Archive at the Institute of Education, London. It's another project job - this time for fourteen months - and I'm loving it already! My job is to catalogue the records of the National Union of Women Teachers (NUWT). The NUWT was founded in 1904 as the Equal Pay League and in 1906 it was re-named the National Federation of Women Teachers. In 1920 it broke away to form an independent union, the National Union of Women Teachers. I wrote a post about my first impressions and first finds over at the Newsam News blog (the blog of the Institute of Education Library and Archive) so I won't repeat what I've said there except to say that the variety of subjects covered in the archive sounds very exciting, a perfect example is the poster shown below for the 'World Youth Conference' held in Prague in 1947. The correspondence, pamphlets and posters for this conference were so filled with optimism and hope for the future, for a new peaceful future, that was wonderful to read. Though at the same time quite sad that the optimism and hopes for peace are still just that, optimism and hope.
From what I've read so far the NUWT was filled with strong, independent females and finding out more about them is going to be a pleasure, and a privilege to get to do s part of my daily work! I've got lots of plans for free publicity I can do and connections and links that can be made with other archives and other organisations, in fact I even had a dream about my plans, on a Friday night - a bit strange granted, but I wouldn't have it any other way, better to over-think and enjoy my work than the other way around. I think I'll be keeping the majority of posts about the project confined to the Newsam News blog but I'm sure the occasional one will stray over here. I'm still going to keep this blog up though as there's plenty of other archive related events I can talk about, like a recent exhibition I went to at the Barbican...
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Congratulations on your new position! Look forward to updates on your experience. Hope you enjoy London - would love to visit someday, circumstances prevailing.
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