In April 2011 the Discovery Programme Environmental department took on a student placement. Amy O'Keeffe; a transition year student from Athy, was with the Discovery Programme for a week and spent part of that time in the Dublin office on Merrion Square and the rest with the Discovery Programme's environmentalist, Dr Ingelise Stuijts. Her work mainly involved sorting and archiving material from the Lake Settlement Project, a dirty job but a good introduction to the world of post-ex environmental archaeology.

The environmental archive of the Lake Settlement Project is a sizable resource but the quantity and waterlogged nature of much of the material has been problematic. Similar problems were encountered by environmental archaeologists across Ireland during the great boom of commercial archaeology. To address issues such as standards for processing, recording and storage, a group of environmentalists, in collaboration with the Institute of Archaeologists of Ireland (IAI), produced a booklet of guidelines which is available in pdf format.