From Poznań to Dundee

During the week of 24-28 May Archive, Records Management and Museum Services was host to Monika Przystalska, an assistant archivist at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Monika had obtained an Erasmus grant that enabled her to travel to the United Kingdom and work in a repository for a week. It had been her wish to improve her archival skills and to experience working in a UK archive, especially a university one. She was aware of us because of our contact with Adam Mickiewicz University through the International Council on Archives Section on University and Research Institution Archives and felt that working with us for a week would be a valuable experience.


During her time here she was given a variety of tasks that enabled her to get as broad a taste as possible of professional archive work. She worked on a number of collections, rearranging them and sorting out discrepancies, and also creating paper and electronic finding aids. Finally she was given an accession to work on that involved writing a handlist and arranging the collection at series and item level.

In addition Monika did some scanning, cleaning, and document retrieval, including collecting items from an offsite storage warehouse in the north of Dundee. Although most of her time was spent in Archive Services Monika was also introduced to the work of Records Management Services, the University Museum, and the Centre for Archive and Information Studies. The University’s Book and Paper Conservation Studio also provided her with an insight into its work as did the Glamis Castle Project Archivist.

By the end of the week Archive Services had benefitted from her competent and excellent work while Monika herself had found the experience ‘very, very interesting’ and had learned a lot – and all this while meeting ‘lots of nice people’!