Speakers
Session 4: Building Positive Resilience
Hosting a Lockdown Internship: A True Test of Resourcefulness, Adaptability and Collaboration
In November 2019 the British Library agreed to host an intern; the first time in collaboration with ICON, and I volunteered to undertake the supervision of this partnership and learning experience with high hopes. As you might expect, I planned to build her bench skills with a repertoire of treatments and decision-making on varied collection items, support her with training and model the all-important communication with stakeholders about treatment strategies and guide her through the intricacies of working for a national institution. Little did we know that the world- not only of conservation but everything that we knew- would be utterly changed in a matter of months. I’d like to take the opportunity to share with fellow ACR’s, the incredible working partnerships and creative approaches that we took, not only to deliver a useful and engaging experience to our emerging conservator, but to embrace the unknown and re-examine the traditional internship experience of which we are all familiar. We rebuilt it in the face of a lockdown of home-working and schooling, leaps in technology and social media and the rapidly changing role of the conservator as collaborator, project manager, innovator and problem-solver so that our intern could truly emerge ready for whatever the new workplace might offer.
Zoë Miller has worked at the British Library for 16 years, following completion of a Master's degree in Book Conservation at Camberwell, UAL and an internship at the American Museum of Natural History, New York. She has worked on manuscripts, printed collections and Eastern material among others, specialising in book conservation and now leads a conservation team who work across the BL's varied collection. In addition to developing and coaching interns and mentoring her team, she continues to carry out research to ensure best practice for the treatment of iron gall inks and develop techniques and decision-making in this complex area of conserving Library materials and to disseminate this to wider audiences.