Emma Free, Digital and Learning Assistant, talks about her first impressions of her first couple of weeks as the new Apprentice for York Museums Trust.

Hello, my name is Emma and I recently started working for the Trust as their new Digital Learning Assistant. It will be a one year Apprenticeship in which I will be working with the Digital and Learning Teams to develop online learning resources in the areas of film, photography and audio.

Along side this I will also be attending York College once a week for an IT course where I will be learning more about elements that will assist my work with the Trust.

Coming from a background in Film Production, a course I studied at York College, I am looking forward to being able to put my prior knowledge to good use in this role, especially when it comes to work with video recording.

I also have a great love and passion for history, which is one of the main reasons why I was so eager to apply for this job. So I am very much looking forward to getting involved in working with both the Learning and Digital Teams in all aspects.

With Christmas being just around the corner at the time of my starting the first couple of weeks have been pleasantly slow, which was good since it gave me chance to nicely grow accustomed to the environment I will be working in and the people I will be working with.

So for the first couple of weeks I spent my time getting to know the museums the Trust run, looking around them and absorbing the information on display. It had been a long time since I last experienced the museums, so it was good to visit the Yorkshire Museum and the Castle Museum, seeing how much they had changed and what was now there as exhibitions.

I found both museums very interesting, taking a lot of photos in both of the museums.

In the second week I was tasked with helping Graham digitise 50 letters from Ismay, with this I learned how to run and fix up the equipment required for such projects, following the careful step by step guide that Martin and Graham had set up.

I found this rather interesting, especially getting to see some glimpses of someone’s life, who wrote to him and what they would write about.

Over the coming weeks I will be starting to work more with the Learning Team, getting to know them and becoming more involved with the work they do.

So even though it has been a slow start I am ready to jump into the deep end and get stuck in with whatever might come my way.