“Archiving can enrich lives”
The value of community involvement in archive projects goes far beyond volunteering, explains Peter Tyas, Manager of Arts and Archives at Wiltshire Council.
--
We’ve got a huge project around Lacock — we’ve recently bought the archive of the estate, with a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. We tend to forget that estates are the original scale of identity for much of England. The archive had already been deposited at the Wiltshire Archive, but the owner was threatening to sell it. It was important for the local community that the archive was not divided up. The archive didn’t have to move — we just changed the labels on the boxes! — but part of the grant was for exhibitions and outreach, and making an app to explore Lacock through archive material.
We’ve used volunteers in all of our processes. Some of the people who volunteered to save the archive from dispersal went on to the next campaign; others have come through to conservation. We’ve had 9,000 volunteer hours — the target was 5,000. Momentum is a huge thing in working with the community. We’ve advertised in the local press. We went through the National Trust, the local civic society, and we’ve created a lot of volunteering and interaction opportunities that we didn’t ‘need’ to do. Creating work to come in. The catalogue is listed in more detail than it ‘needs’ to be.
Volunteers can relieve burden on a range of menial tasks within a conservator’s work. The workforce in conservation is tiny and the workload is cathedral-size. With volunteers, productivity goes up, but volunteers burn out. We trained people in a range of skills, but volunteers might work 1,000 percent slower, because they actually read the document they are conserving, and talk about it. They aren’t under economic pressure. The semi-skilled volunteers in the department support less confident people next to them. Their motivation ranges from CV-boosting or ‘just something to do’, to feeling like you are part of a team. We’ve turned volunteers into peer mentors for other community archivists.
Archiving can enrich lives. We’re doing an oral history project with 27 veterans in Wiltshire, who were part of arctic convoys in World War Two. Through that process, we’ve found 10 more, and they’re now better connected to this community. We’ve also experimented with e-volunteering. We’ve taken a learning package from the archive out to day centres and care homes, and seen groups form in those facilities. We e-mail them a packet of scans and as a community they would index and catalogue what was sent to them. But they would also return what they as a group had reflected upon. They would add a layer of information which reflected their own identity. We need to figure out a way of acknowledging that heritage. It’s a huge opportunity.
We should see this kind of work as a therapeutic intervention. Heritage is what’s been added in to our stories, within the process of living with those stories. There is instrumental value in exploring issues around bereavement, how people deal with grief and guilt and inter-personal relationships. We can address social isolation; we need to see what heritage can offer public health and mental health. Especially as ours is largely a funereal landscape in Wiltshire. By engaging with monuments of the ancient past, and understanding how people lived, we have healthy opportunities to explore death and renewal.
Using archives to improve mental health [Asylum archives can change minds]
