A Week in the Life of Working at a Museum

Hi, my name is Bella, and this week, I have had the privilege of working with the amazing team at Newton Abbot Museum for my work experience. I am in Year 10 studying my History GCSE, at Torquay Girls’ Grammar School, and I have to do at least 1 week of work experience before the end of this academic year. I knew that Newton Abbot Museum was a great option, as it is local and I would learn some local history along the way, from the Bronze and Iron Ages to modern day. In the past, I have also done 3 sessions of Young Curators over the past few years, so I already had some prior knowledge from that too (for example looking at bugs in the bug traps, object handling etc.).

I enjoyed a lot about working at a museum, but I think my favourite thing about it is all the people that have helped me along the way- they are such an amazing team with even more amazing skills, and I could never have done this without them. Thanks to them, I would never have had 4 incredible days of working here. However, my favourite activity was probably looking through all the different boxes, which contained museum artefacts, as each object tells a different story- whether a large painting or a dessert spoon. My favourite thing to learn about here was probably either the railways and GWR or Madge Mellor, as I didn’t really know much about either of these things, but now I can come out of this experience and say that I’ve learnt so much about these topics, and I would like to do further research in my own time.

Apart from looking through boxes, I have completed a variety of tasks over the past few days, both in the museum and the clock tower. I didn’t realise that the clock tower was also owned by the museum, and it was really cool learning about the fascinating history behind it, as well as how it’s shaped today- it’s definitely well worth a visit if you live locally.

In the museum, I have also helped with the social media- and I have picked a few objects for Museum Object Monday and Photo Friday, as well as updating some of the cases with new QR codes for the Curio app. It was fun trying to see how you could get things in and out of the cases, although there was a bit of running from time to time. Some of the other tasks around the museum have been more therapeutic, including writing this blog and cutting out the QR codes. However, I was shocked to see what types of critters were in the bug traps!

One of the things I didn’t expect to have been doing was photography. Photography is such an important part of working in a museum, and I have used several types of cameras to take pictures of different things- one of the tasks I had to do was take photos of shop stock for the computers (which I now am a lot better at using!), and I also took pictures for a primary school visit to the museum. They will be looking at the Victorians, and one of the activities planned for them was to create a scrapbook of their visit there, as well as viewing a Victorian scrapbook. I found some examples online, but I also took pictures of some actual scrapbooks, which I loved looking at. From different men representing different common occupations of the period to bouquets of flowers, this scrapbook was definitely full of surprises!