EMCO Internship Programme

In September 2021 EMCO launched an internship programme for postgraduate students. Interns were identified by open advertising through the Association for Documentary Editing, with further publicity through our X and Bluesky account.

The required and preferred qualifications were as follows:

Graduate students (at least one year of studies completed) or recent masters-level graduates in history or English, archival studies or library science.
Experience working in digital collections
Familiarity with eighteenth-century handwriting and spelling conventions

Interns receive a contract that requires them to work for an average of twelve hours a week (or such number to be agreed), and are paid at an hourly rate just above the National Living Wage.

The principal assigned activity to date is the transcription and XML tagging of Elizabeth Montagu’s letters to Elizabeth Carter. This is one of the largest and most important sections of the correspondence, with around 700 letters lasting for most of Montagu’s adult life, with wide-ranging comments on external affairs and her personal and literary interests.

The interns receive training in diplomatic transcription and XML mark-up techniques. Their work is credited on the EMCO website in relation to the particular letters they have worked on.

An additional aspect of the internship programme in 2021 was the opportunity to work on the Montagu manuscripts in the Tyne and Wear archive, and to be trained in archival techniques in order to produce the first ever catalogue of the documents contained in this large collection. It is anticipated that further archival work may be available in the future.

The internship programme has run successfully four times since 2021, with two of the interns from the programme extending their contracts and subsequently taking on the roles of research assistants for the project.

EMCO are grateful to the previous interns Ben Wilkinson-Turnbull, Charlotte Emily Crawshaw, Rachel Smith, Amber Vella, Katie Crowther, Amy Wilcockson, Sarah Van Eyndhoven, Abby Hammond, Constance Halstead and Katie Devlin.

Please note that all dates and location information are provisional, initially taken from the library and archive catalogues. As our section editors continue to work through the material we will update our database and the changes will be reflected across the edition.

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