Case studies of employability practice
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Employability component:
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Reflective practice in the curriculum
Developing graduate attributes in the curriculum
Employer engagement & work-related/based learning
Careers education, information, advice and guidance (CEIAG)
The student experience: employability in the co and extra-curriculum
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Please use this form to record case studies of employability practice articulating the activity
undertaken and the impact it has had or is having on the employability of students.
Case study
School: Arts and Humanities
Division: History and Politics
Course: Scottish Political
Archive
Lead contact and contact details: Sarah Bromage
Description of the case study to include the following:
Please describe your course.
What do you think is particularly effective about your practice?
Overall benefits to your students?
Overall benefits to you?
The Scottish Political Archive (SPA) is based within History and Politics at the University. SPA
aims to collect political material and archives from Scottish politicians and political
organisations in order to chronicle the political history of Scotland in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. At present our main activities include cataloguing the archives of
former First Minister Jack McConnell, active collecting and campaign study for the
forthcoming independence referendum as well as general collecting relating to Scottish
politics and devolution.
Since the inception of the archive we have worked with student volunteers from History and
Politics. The volunteers have assisted with all aspects of cataloguing and curation of the
collection including preparing outreach packs for school groups, undertaking museum
workshops, exhibition design and installation as well as weeding, sorting and cataloguing of
the collection. At present we also have a small team of student volunteers attending
referendum events, collecting campaign materials and taking photographs of the
referendum campaign.
Through their work here, students acquire a number of key skills through activities of
embedded learning. In particular, they become acquainted with the processing, analysis and
ordering of large data sets as well as information technology and database management.
Moreover, they gain subject-specific knowledge and skills, in particular on the internal
workings of political processes in the present and throughout twentieth-century history.
This work is an invaluable help to the archive as we operate with one part-time archivist.
The amount of cataloguing and collection work undertaken by the archive would simply not
Case studies of employability practice
be able to be undertaken without the assistance of our volunteers.
The archive asks students to volunteer approximately 3 hours per week during the course of
their studies. However, we are flexible in terms of days that this is delivered and exam
periods during the academic year. We ask all volunteers what tasks they are most
interested in undertaking and aim to match them with their chosen area of interest. We
would aim that by the end of their period with us they have experience of the full range of
tasks involved in archiving: from when a collection arrives into the archive, through the
cataloguing process, digitisation and finally the outreach activities involved in promoting an
archive.
We aim to make the experience as enjoyable as possible for our volunteers, and they often
work with each other on projects in a team environment. We hope that their experience
with us is enjoyable and adds to their employability skills following graduation. Previous
volunteers have gone on to undertake Masters courses and paid archival work. One of our
volunteers, Carol, who is graduating in 2014 said about her experience of volunteering:
‘Now that I am leaving university, sadly my time volunteering has come to an end. Yet, I
have taken away many things including, for example, a sounder understanding of politics
from an inner point of view. It has also added to my skills and now I can say I am familiar
with cataloguing and other aspects of archiving, which of course looks very impressive on
my C.V’
Case studies of employability practice