Day #1: The National Portrait Gallery

The first day and we all arrive at the National Portrait Gallery (after a brief visit to the adjacent National Gallery for those of us more directionally challenged). Nervous but excited, we are directed into one of the many hidden rooms that seem to hide behind every gallery. We find ourselves in a little basement studio, the walls lined with boxes of art supplies and dressing-up clothes. Tea and biscuits are in the back.

All is well.

Six people speak to us before lunch. They say some very interesting things:

Liz Smith: Head of Learning and Access

First to speak, Liz attempts to give an idea of what the National Portrait Gallery is all about (portraiture plays a big role).

One thing that sets the NPG apart from many other Galleries is it's very active acquisitions approach. A lot of time and effort is put into commissioning new portraits to be made of "important" people, and more modern works are also being encouraged.

Learning and Access involves organising events for school groups, special needs students and hospital schools, as well as adult courses. There are one hell of a lot of courses and events that go on throughout the year - I really suggest checking out the NPG's website or getting your hands on some leaflets to find out more. If you're 14 to 21 (both "young" and a "person") you can even take part in some activities completely free of charge (yay!).

Robin Francis: Head of Archive and Library

Now, I'm a bit of a library nut, so you'll have to forgive me if I wax a tad too lyrical. The Heinz (no relation to beans) Archive and Library is a bit of a hidden gem, as are most of the libraries and reading rooms associated with museums. Getting only 2000 of the gallery's 1.6 million visitors per year, the public study room is really an underused resource. That said, most of the people who use it are undertaking some pretty serious research into books, new exhibitions and the like - helping them find what they need must be a learning experience in itself.

There are eleven staff in the department, who are aided by quite a few volunteers. They acquire about 500 new books a year and have a budget of only £700 a year for new prints and drawings (although they already have 80,000 prints and drawings, only 20,000 of which have been catalogued).

The library at the NPG isn't really a library of books, it's a visual research tool. It's essentially a library of anything that could possibly be referred to as a portrait.

They take auction house catalogues apart, mount the pictures of portraits on card and file them. Any pictures of portraits that are sent to them are immediately filed. They even dismantle duplicate books in order to file the pictures they contain into this vast visual repository.

They process about 15,000 images a year, and here's the kicker: it's all completely manual. A lot of the museum's collections are catalogued in a computerised database, but technical and copyright restrictions mean that this visual library is only searchable physically, only in one place on the whole planet can you look through it's contents to find the image that you want.

It must be enormous.

Denise Ellitson: Marketing Manager

The marketing department of the NPG has two main tasks: Communications (promoting the gallery) and Development (raising money). The gallery only gets about half of what it needs to actually function from the government, the rest comes from sponsorship, lottery-like grants and rich individual contributors.

Denise says herself that marketing is marketing, no matter where you do it, so I'm not going to go into too much detail here about that. There are plenty of good marketing (and design) blogs out there if you do want to find out more.

One very interesting idea that comes out is that the NPG is seen my many as "schizophrenic in a good way". It is stuffed to the brim with old, austere, historical portraits but then has loads of modern exhibitions (Four Corners, Face of Fashion) and oodles of photography. It really is hard to place it into one definite category.

Eddie Otchere: Inspire Fellow

Eddie is currently working as assistant to the contemporary curator, and part of his job is to commission portraits and negotiate with potential sitters to work out who will paint them.

Before becoming an Inspire Fellow (an Arts Council initiative to employ people who wouldn't normally follow a career in museums and galleries to bring in new ideas) Eddie worked as a graffiti street art curator, doing guerrilla shows. Sounds like a fun job.

The latest thing he's been involved with is "Devotional" by Sonia Boyce. It's kind of a conceptual room with the names of influential black songstresses printed on the walls, surrounded by bubbles of blue colouring pencil. He picked out images from the museum's existing collection to illustrate it.

The most striking idea from his talk is his claim that he can't imagine anyone having just one career anymore. I think he might be right. There are so many interesting things in the world, and it's so much easier to connect to people and ideas, it seems like a waste not to explore every interest in as much detail as possible.

Claire Zammit: Head of Visitor Services and Security

Claire runs the public face of the gallery: the VSAs (Visitor Services Assistants) on the gallery floor, ticket sales, distributing marketing material, looking after school groups. This is basically the part of a museum that people are most familiar with, and seems like a good way to get a feel for working in museums. (I'm planning to look into a Saturday job as a VSA, actually...)

Rachel Moss: Young People's Programmes Manager

"Young People" is a phrase I detest with the fire of a thousand suns, but Rachel is lovely and actually has some really interesting ideas.

I'm not sure that events at the National Portrait Gallery are really up there on the list of things that young homeless people and young offenders really need, but the heart is clearly in the right place.

The content of a placement at the NPG is tempting: researching and designing a guide for the pop art exhibition in October, doing a podcast/audio guide thing about a favourite portrait, and the promise that we can build into the placement the things we're interested in (read: as much time as possible down in that library).

There's also the opportunity for a two day practical photography course, which I'm really interested in. After lunch we had a taster of what that would be like, and it was pretty amazing. Half the group went out and took photographs of London, and my half had a tour of some of the important 18th/19th century portraits and then wend downstairs and used some very imposing, giant cameras to take black and white pictures of ourselves wearing silly fancy-dress. (Hopefully I'll soon have a link to some scans).

Both a lot of fun and a perfect example of the NPG's lovable schizophrenia.

Tate Modern and Tate Britain tomorrow.