Riitta Ojanperä, PhD, Director, Collections Management, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki
25 January 2018
Last year the Finnish National Gallery launched a research internship programme for master’s-level students in art history, cultural history and museology. The first round of applications resulted in employing three graduate students for a three-month period during the autumn of 2017.
As a museum organisation, the FNG feels deeply its responsibility to pass on to future museum professionals and researchers of art and cultural history the enthusiasm, commitment and practical skills to work with a variety of art-historical sources. The defined task of each intern was to engage in hands-on original research using a selected part of the Finnish National Gallery’s collections. The interns had two nominated mentors from the FNG senior curatorial staff with substantial research expertise to support their work.
The interns were expected to reflect their own research questions and interests in relation to the information and issues raised by working intensively and purposively in our research archives. They were also expected to produce a text related to their materials and working process.
In this issue of the FNG Research web magazine we are delighted to publish the results of the research carried out by two of our first three research interns. It turned out, that their readiness and assiduity in answering the challenge of writing a professional scientific article exceeded our expectations. The authors Aino Nurmesjärvi and Max Fritze are Finnish MA students, whose articles are based on the work carried out during their research internship periods.
FNG’s commitment, however, extends not only to future generations of researchers and museum professionals but also to the continuing development of its own staff, through its staff residency programme. While our first research interns were delving into our archives, one of the FNG’s senior professionals, Dr. Hanna-Leena Paloposki, was taking part in a work exchange programme at the Europeana Foundation office in The Hague, also during the autumn of 2017. Her target was to amplify FNG’s know-how regarding compiling and publishing digital collections’ data in a substantial international and pragmatic context. She explains how she got on in an interview in this issue.
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Featured image: Screen capture of the front page of the image gallery ’Masterpieces of Finnish Art’ on the Europeana Collections website featuring art works from the Finnish National Gallery collections
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