Back to back internship award wins for Blenheim Palace archives team
For its second consecutive year, Blenheim Palace has been awarded Gold Standard Internship Host in recognition of its innovative Archive Internship Programme.
Since 2019, Blenheim Palace has collaborated with University of Oxford Careers Service and Internship Office to offer students the chance to acquire valuable experience in archival work alongside their academic studies. The programme features five-day placements conducted over two weeks at the end of each term.
Interns participate in tasks such as identifying and transcribing digital images of archival materials related to Blenheim Palace and the Dukes of Marlborough. The programme also involves contributing to building a staff database by extracting names from wage books dating back to the 1850s, with over 5,000 entries recorded to date.
Each year the Internship Office officially recognises the excellent internship experience their partners provide to Oxford students. The recognition as a Gold Standard Internship Host reflects a strong commitment to the Internship Office programmes, the consistently high quality of feedback from interns, the reliability of internship opportunities, and prompt communication with both students and the Internship Office. It also acknowledges the responsiveness to constructive feedback.
Dr Alexa Frost, Archivist at Blenheim Palace, said: “It is a pleasure to have worked with over 40 interns from the University of Oxford. To be awarded the Gold Standard Internship Host for the second consecutive year is an honour and testament to our ongoing commitment of collaborative work with the university.
“By using letters from people living on the Estate, staff wage books and receipts found in and around the Palace, we can build a database chronicling the estate’s changing social history over the centuries. We are aiming to make this available to members of the public next summer when they will be able to search for their relatives and view digitised copies of ledger entries for their ancestor’s work on the Blenheim Estate.”
Initially, students visited the Blenheim Palace Archives to engage with various aspects of archival work in person. However, following the onset of the pandemic, the UNESCO World Heritage Site adapted its archival processes, enabling students to continue their internships remotely.
To find out more about Blenheim Palace and its archives visit, https://archives.blenheimpalace.com/
ENDS
About Blenheim Palace
Home to the Dukes of Marlborough since 1705, Blenheim Palace was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.
Set in over 2,000 acres of ‘Capability’ Brown landscaped parkland and designed by Vanbrugh in the Baroque style, it was financed by Queen Anne, on behalf of a grateful nation, following the first Duke of Marlborough’s triumph over the French in the War of the Spanish Succession.
Today it houses one of the most important and extensive collections in Europe, which includes portraits, furniture, sculpture and tapestries.
Blenheim Palace is also the birthplace of one of Britain’s most famous leaders, Sir Winston Churchill, and it was his father who described the vista on entering the Estate from the village of Woodstock as the ‘finest view in England’.
