In this blog post, Archives Assistant, Ruth, shares a glimpse into a typical day in her role at the Royal Berkshire Archives.

I will start by saying there really is no typical day as an Archives Assistant. Some days we spend more time with customers face to face, others we will be doing more behind the scenes tasks. Most days, we will do a mixture of both, but no two days are the same! 

Today my day started with morning reception duty. This involves setting up our reception area, ensuring we have everything ready for our visitors who will be arriving throughout the day. On reception, as you would expect, we take phone calls (we really do get asked about pretty much any topic!), make bookings for our customers, take payments from visitors and deal with general admin.  

We have many regular customers and so reception is often an area where our visitors, new and old, like to have a chat with us, catching up and updating us on the progress of their research.  

Today involved making a few bookings, filling in document request slips and welcoming visitors researching a variety of topics including family history, transcribing for the Berkshire Family History Society, the Reading Dispensary, the Berkshire schools project, breweries and Wokingham Theatre. 

With bookings up to date and a lull in phone calls, I spent time working on stage 2 of our library project, fleshing out our catalogue spreadsheet. When the project is complete, users will be able to search our vast collection of nearly 12,000 items of library material – books, pamphlets, journals and the like – on our online catalogue. 

Lunch came at 1pm and I handed over reception duty to my colleague.  

For the afternoon I was ready to tackle something different. I sorted through and added closure dates to some 1920s Broadmoor female patient case files and updated our cataloguing software – CALM – accordingly. This kind of work is best undertaken for an hour or two, as the material can be quite challenging. So, after going through a few files, I decide to start looking at some documents for ideas for a future exhibition. This involved making a long list of items, getting them out of the strongrooms and assessing them for their suitability. Producing documents helps me get my step count up after a morning on reception! I end up retrieving items from three of our six strongrooms. 

Sandwiched between these two tasks is a check of our online post register (a log of all of our incoming enquiries) to see if I have any emails or research requests that have come back to me. I respond to an enquiry relating to a journal that we receive for the library and then I turn to an email from someone I have been doing research for on her ancestors who were orphaned in tragic circumstances. This next piece of research goes on my to-do list for tomorrow morning, when I will be in the searchroom on document issue desk duty.  

I am looking forward to finishing my working week in the searchroom, assisting our researchers and working on some research into the young woman living in Victorian Cold Ash, who had to give up her children... so tomorrow will be different to today, but as always, having a curious mind is what makes this job interesting!