We spoke to Eleanor from the Education and Interpretation Department to find out about what they do.

What does your job involve?

My job title is 'Senior Events and Exhibitions Coordinator'. I work in the Education and Interpretation Department, in the Interpretation team. Interpretation work involves thinking about how to interpret, explain and bring to life documents held by the National Archives in order to open them up to more people.

Day to day, my job involves organising events, exhibitions and the museum - which acts like a window onto the archives. My job has a strong public focus, I try to raise awareness of the National Archives. In Interpretation we try to reach new audiences, we have an 'Outreach Coordinator' whose job is to liaise with specific communities and encourage them to use the National Archives.

The Interpretation team runs various events such as lectures, costumed events and an Open Day every September, and much of my work revolves around organizing these events. Exhibitions take place both in the museum here at Kew in the National Archives, and also online in the virtual museum - we have recently completed the Secrets and Spies exhibition.

A Tudor Peddlar tells visitors about life in Tudor England at a costumed event in the museum.

Are there problems putting exhibitions online that do not occur with traditional exhibitions?

When creating either physical or online exhibitions, you need to develop or borrow expertise in the area you are researching.

But with a purely online exhibition it is very important to have good copies of documents so the audience can examine them closely. As well as the technical problem of making the document legible online, you need to think about how to make them more than just illustrations and how to bring them to life as exhibits.

The web is a good medium because people can get closer to the documents. Also it lets you create interactive content - for example in the "Secrets and Spies" exhibition there is an interactive feature where online visitors can send an encoded message to a friend by email.

What do you like about your job?

I like the people and all the different things going on at the National Archives, but also the fact that the documents here span such a huge range of history from 1200 onwards. There seems to be no aspect of British history that we couldn't cover in an exhibition.

What's the most interesting document you have come across at the National Archives?

I think it would have to be the Ruth Ellis' prison file (ref: PCOM 9/2084) because I found reading it much more absorbing than I expected.

Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in Britain. She had killed her lover. The file contains lots of information about her last days alive - there are newspaper cuttings, reports by the prison psychiatrist, the last letters she wrote and pleas for her release.

It makes for very chilling reading material because it contains Ruth Ellis' own words written just a few days before her death. Reading it, you are taken right up to the final minutes before she was hanged and I found it much more realistic and emotive than any of the dramatic accounts of this story I have seen. One particularly chilling aspect of the story is that just a few minutes before Ruth Ellis was due to be executed officials received a telephone call claiming that the government had issued a reprieve. The execution was delayed for just a minute or so until it was established it was a crank call. Even though I knew the outcome I was on the edge of my seat reading it!

What are you working on at the moment?

At the moment I am working on an exhibition about the representation of women in war posters called 'They Can't Get on Without Us!'. It looks at posters and propaganda aimed at women in the services, the land army and also in the home. It will look at the purpose of propaganda and different representations of women at war from domestic angels to industrial heroines.

Finally, what do think will be achieved by the bringing together of the Historical Manuscripts Commission and the Public Record Office to form The National Archives?

I think in a way it's a shame to lose our Public Record Office title because it's quite idiosyncratic. But the new name makes us more obvious, open and available to the public so it has to be a good thing.