Connecting with Collections: Research Internships promoting closer collaboration between University Museums

During 2013, the University of Cambridge Museums (UCM) introduced an innovative research internship initiative aimed at early career academic researchers. The Connecting with Collections (CwC) scheme offered six interns from British universities the opportunity to gain hands-on museum experience, while working independently on individual research projects within the collections of the UCM consortium. This paper presents: 1. An Overview of Connecting with Connections Scheme: programme rationale, aims and funding, recruitment and project choice. 2. Training and Opportunities: group training sessions, as well as snapshots of individual experiences within the museums and 3. Internship Outputs: including an end-of-internship Symposium and other outcomes for interns. It briefly surveys the six internship projects before drawing some conclusions about the CwC programme and highlighting some of the debates around the future direction of the internship scheme for UCM.