#CrowdCymru: Phase 1 Summary
Hello all, it’s Jen here, Digital Volunteering Project Officer for CrowdCymru.
Here follows an update and conclusion of the National Lottery Heritage funded phase of our digital archives volunteering project. This is the fifth instalment in a series of posts, to read the previous four, go to the Archives and Records Council Wales website and search CrowdCymru.
Well, all good things must come to an end and this post will look back at 16 months of project highlights, outputs, and future plans.
This project was established to pilot a global crowdsourcing community for Wales via a collaboration between Gwent Archives, Glamorgan Archives, Cardiff University Special Collections & Archives and National Library Wales. The aim was to build a crowdsourcing platform and community for archives in Wales, a cohesive national approach unprecedented in the UK, to harness the knowledge and time of global citizens to enrich existing basic metadata, amplify the visibility of these primary archive collections, and ignite new research.
Our highlights begin, of course, with those global citizens, a truly international group of incredibly hard-working volunteers. I have come to know many of them via correspondence and training sessions and their friendliness and enthusiasm to support the work of archives services has been a joy. They have diligently worked through all the collections the project partners put forward. They have transcribed the letters of a war poet and the wartime diaries of a volunteer nurse, and tagged photographs of early 20th century immigrants, the life in pictures of a Welsh rugby & athletics club and an important collection of ephemera from an early 1980s lesbian and gay group.
To mark their hard work, they were gifted an electronic certificate of thanks and invited to attend an online end of project party on 27 November. Representatives from the partner institutions also joined to give thanks in person and talk through the phenomenal impact their work will have regarding improved access and future searchability of these collections.
Another highlight has been features in numerous publications including two entries in both Who Do You Think You Are Magazine and the Archive & Records Association Members Magazine [ARC]. We also recorded a podcast for The Archives & Records Association, who have recorded lots of fascinating interviews from people who work with archives for their Out the Box series. As part of Volunteer Week, they recorded some volunteer specials and #Crowd Cymru was one of them. You can listen to our episode here.
We were also featured in Archives Wales’s Into the Archives Report 2023 and The National Archives’ A Year in Archives 2023.
Our project outputs comprise two formats, the first being a web page hosted on the Gwent Archives website: #CrowdCymru | Gwent Archives containing links to all our social media platforms, presentations, articles, images, all these blog posts and a lovely end of project activity. We asked our volunteers to choose a favourite document, image, or collection they had worked on during the project but using no more than 150 words. The idea came from a project run by Brighton & Hove Museums during 2022/2023. A small group of our volunteers took part in this creative exercise and the results [a joy to read!] were turned into a power point presentation shown at the end of project celebration. It is on the project home page, but you can also view here:
Our second output is a project handbook, available to view as a PDF on the web page. This handbook is split into two parts, the first is a step-by-step guide to using the crowdsourcing platform, including registering an account, transcription and tagging guidelines. The second part contains project management notes on recruiting and supporting volunteers, promotion and marketing, and experience of working on a National Lottery Heritage Funded project. Included in this section are also results of a volunteer feedback survey and lessons learnt. The purpose of this handbook is to share good practice and facilitate the expansion of the pilot to include more repositories and partners across Wales in the future.
This leads on to thoughts of the future and exciting news of an extension!
As mentioned above, the National Heritage Lottery Fund phase of this project did indeed end on 30 November. However, we are now able to proceed until the end of May 2024 with new funding from the National Library of Wales. This comes as part of the library’s work on the Our Heritage, Our Stories project which is linking and searching community-generated digital content to develop the people’s national collection. Therefore, our volunteers can continue to work on improving access to these collections and move us towards the next steps in our vision for a democratised, connected, and global outlook for hidden archives and new research in Wales.
This will be our last post here, future posts charting progress of this second phase of #CrowdCymru will appear on the National Library Wales’s website: https://blog.library.wales/
All that’s left is to thank the National Lottery Heritage Fund without whose funding and support, this project would not have been possible. Thanks also those organisations within the archive and heritage sector who have buoyed us with their time, energy and lots of practical support.
Finally, thank you to our wonderful group of exceptionally hardworking and enthusiastic volunteers, it has been a privilege, and we look forward to sharing the next phase of #CrowdCymru with you all.
Jennifer Evans
Digital Volunteering Project Officer / Swyddog Prosiect Gwirfoddoli Digidol
Twitter: CrowdCymru
Phone / Ffôn: 01495 742450
Email / Ebost: jennifer.evans@gwentarchives.gov.uk
This blog post titled #CrowdCymru: Project Update by Jennifer Evans is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
