 My name is Melissa Bennett and I'm a PhD student at the University of Warwick. My project is part of a collaboration with the British Library called Africa's Sons Under Arms. The title of my PhD project is Picturing the West India Regiment, and I'm looking at the period between 1865 up until 1914, which is the beginning of the First World War. Most of the main results that I use are actually based in London, so I've worked on quite a lot of material here at the Imperial War Museum. The British Library, because it holds at least one copy of most books that have ever been published in English. If there's a book that you need, it's most likely that you can get it there if you can't get it in other places. I came across this particular project almost by accident, getting to work with photographs was something I hadn't really done before, so it was a great opportunity for me to learn new skills. I think one of the biggest challenges is like focusing down on things. There are hundreds of photos in like hundreds of places, so I've had to decide what specific photographs I want to look at in most detail, and then even when you're writing up you have to lose some of the ones that you thought you would talk about. The staff there are all really helpful, all these students there are all really great. There's not really like a competitive atmosphere amongst people. Everyone's willing to help each other out and share anything that might be a really good opportunity. The fact that it's a collaborative PhD, it gives you a more well-rounded experience and you get different workshops and different courses and you interact with different people at both organisations. It's been really good for me to have two different opinions on my work.