I have been a volunteer at National Museums Scotland for about five years now and work within the Science and Technology department; not at the Museum on Chambers Street but in the National Museums Collection Centre in Granton. This in itself gives a ‘behind the scenes’ view of the museum and its collections.
I thoroughly enjoy my time there and although the work, if described to an outsider, might be considered as repetitive and never ending as we are recording 19th and 20th century engineering drawings, it is far from that possible impression.
The drawings in themselves are the working ‘patterns’ that were used to create many intricate machines, some very large machines (such as a machine for putting the pattern onto lino) and to see the detail to which all were drafted is incredible. Precision, clarity and attention to detail are viewed by us on each drawing we are dealing with. I find great enjoyment and honour to be one of a very few who can see these now and understand how they came about. I think I must have had some encouragement from my father, who was an architect and created plans almost free-hand to design houses using a beautiful set of drafting pens with ink on a large drawing board.
But other than this main thrust of my current work and the S & T project to ensure the future safety and cataloguing of all drawings, I often do other things. This includes finding machines within Granton, identifying parts of machines and then locating the actual machine that they belong to in the stores, taking and returning items that need to be photographed and seeing and handling (carefully and with gloves on!) the first sewing machine to be made.
Life is not boring or repetitive and when you come across an item that is the same as one that you also owned (as I have done), then perhaps that is the time that you realise that you are also a trainee fossil! It is fun and I love it, long may it continue.