Over the past year we’ve had the pleasure of working with staff at Keele University to provide placements for students from their School of Humanities.

The opportunity came about after working with Dominic Janes, Professor of Modern History at Keele, on the Laughter in the Long Twentieth Century exhibition in 2025, who put us in touch with his colleagues in the placement team. Our offer was advertised to students, along with many others, in the Winter term of 2025, with placements beginning in January 2026. We had applications from two students, Saleem and James, who would be working with us remotely during the entirety of their placement.

Whilst setting up and running remote volunteering can be challenging, we had had some experience over the last few years of working with students in this way, so felt that we would be in a good place to widen this offer out to students outside of Kent. As their placements required them to complete 70 and 100 hours of effort respectively, we decided we would split the role into three seperate tasks, to not only widen the students experience of the sorts of collections you might work with in an archive setting, but also to give them some task variation over their time with us.

I initially met with the students for a short interview in December, where we discussed their interest in the project and what they might bring to it. Then, after both agreeing to move forward with the placement, we met again in January to kick off the placement and to go through training and expectations. Regular catch ups where then scheduled throught the placement for us to all check in. The work was organised using Google Drive and Teams. The activities they worked on were:

• Creating metadata listing of cartoons by Martin Rowson in the British Cartoon Archive
• Editing transcripts and creating content summaries for audio in our Winstanley Oral History Collection
• Creating metadata listing for theatre playbills in our David Drummond Pantomime Collection

The placements ran up unitl the end of May 2026. We are so grateful to both Saleem and James for the time and effort they have spent with us over the last few months. Here are some reflections from them…

From James:

Over the last five months, we have been cataloguing artefacts from three collections to make them available online via the university’s online catalogues. This will benefit the academic community, particularly those with an interest in local and theatrical history and politics, as well as the local community.

The Martin Rowson Collection documents over three decades of political and social activity across the United Kingdom. We listed almost 200 cartoons in this collection, which will be added to the British Cartoon Archive, one of the largest cartoon collections in the UK. The cartoons that we have been creating metadata for will be among the most significant nationally, since they are the work of Martin Rowson, cartoonist for The Guardian. His art style makes the caricatures appear amusing and satirical to the reader, whilst also educating them about the event from that day.

The David Drummond Collection is an extensive collection documenting the history of pantomime over 200 years through playbills and other materials. Through the work we have carried out, users will be able to search by pantomime title, location of each performance, as well as by actor/actress if they are looking for something specific.

The Winstanley Collection is an oral history collection consisting of a series of interviews conducted by Michael Winstanley with Kent residents in the 1970s, discussing life in Kent at the turn of the 20^th century. In these recordings, they discuss their lives and how the local community has shaped them and others. This work involved editing transcripts and creating content summaries, which will make the collection more accessible and discoverable to users. This will be impactful to the local community, as some members may well be descended from the people interviewed. Therefore, this will allow them not only to learn about them but also to listen to them in their own words.

From Saleem:

How did I start?
Through a placement module at my university, I got the opportunity to apply to work with The University of Kent’s special collections and archives (UKSCA) on three of their collections. The collections included the Martin Rowson Guardian cartoons, David Drummond playbills and Michael Winstanley oral history collection. After reading the description of the tasks I had to complete I decided it would be an amazing fit for myself and after applying and interviewing, I got the job. I had 5 months to complete 75 hours’ worth of work online starting from January which was great news.

Martin Rowson Cartoons Collections
This collection was my favorite one to work on. The collection comprises many cartoons that Martin Rowson has drawn to be published in the Guardian newspaper in recent years. How politicians and scenarios are drawn out was something I found very funny. It made it an extremely enjoyable experience cataloguing them. It was also great as I could catch up on what was happening across those years, how people perceived these scenarios and how important they were.  All this combined made this collection one of my favorite ones to complete due to how fun the material I was working on was and the manner of the work I had to complete.

David Drummond Playbill Collection
This collection comprised of numerous playbills collected overtime by David Drummond from pantomimes. The playbills were from the 19^th century to the 20^th century from across the UK. I found this collection to be a very good insight into what the entertainment industry used to be like. The way they advertised and sold tickets to shows has completely changed and how they did it was very simple. It was also incredible to see what pantomimes are still going on to this day. Many of the shows have now been adapted over time but seeing how they originated was fascinating. It opened my eyes to what theatre used to be like and understanding that this used to be people’s primary form of entertainment made this collection feel more important to me since this was probably so important to everyone who went to these pantomimes.

Michael Winstanley Oral History Collection
This collection was very fascinating to me. It comprises of transcriptions of different interviews Michael Winstanley carried out with people who lived in Kent during the turn of the 20^th century. He asked these people about different aspects of their lives, even the menial parts such as what they primarily used to eat and drink, school life and much more. It opened my eyes to what people had to experience and to know that it came from a person who grew up living this way and knew nothing else except for that helped me understand how far humanity has come in less than a century. The lack of options they had would only cover 10% of the options we have available to use now. It is also fascinating as we could be the ones being interviewed for someone in the future to look at and think about how people could live like this.

To Conclude
This opportunity has been amazing. With so much history to look back on and realizing what each collection represents, it makes me wonder what else there is about the past that we could catalogue so that we can better understand the people who came before us. With how much knowledge and enrichment I have gained from working on these collections, I hope to gain more from finding different aspects of people’s lives from the past to catalogue.