My name is Caitlin, I went to the West Lothian Archives and Records centre for my work experience, and it proved to be a very enjoyable week. When I arrived on Monday morning I was taken for a quick tour of the archives, and I was amazed to see how many boxes of documents there are! I was also delighted by the moving shelves in the archives, what can I say; I’m easily amused!

I then began work digitising photographs of Livingston from the ‘60s and ‘70s in preparation for them to be uploaded to flickr, a photo sharing website, for Livingston’s 50^th birthday next year. You may think that it’s just a little early to start uploading pictures for an anniversary next year, but there are 6000 photographs in the Livingston development corporation collection, each with their own description written in three log books and even with a week of working on this task I barely scratched the surface.

Some of the photographs that I was digitising proved to be very interesting; there were many aerial shots of Livingston revealing lots about the town that I didn’t know, and it was fascinating to see as I went thought the pictures, the progression from plans for buildings, to construction, to the buildings as they are today. As well as enlightening aerial shots, there were a number of photographs that I liked, not only because of the insight they gave into what this area was like forty or fifty years ago, but because they were excellent photographs. In particular a photograph of three little girls with their hands on their hips in a v formation on steps, looking down on another little girl made me laugh when I first saw it, and a black and white photograph of a helicopter put a smile on my face.

On the whole I greatly enjoyed my time working at the archives, and I’ll be sad when, on Monday morning, I have to go to school and not come back here.

Have a look at some of the images I digitised, go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/westlopics/