Volunteers at the History Centre
- 16th January 2012
Over the ten years since opening the History Centre has had many volunteers working on various and numerous tasks. The volunteers have been a cross section of people, including retired, unemployed and students – some people just dropped in to see if they could help!
The role of volunteers is hugely beneficial to us as it allows us to increase of work in areas which may otherwise be neglected. Volunteering also proves to be a benefit to the individual too though, as several of our younger volunteers have secured employment by using their work with us to enhance their cvs.
In these last few years our volunteers have concentrated on the ‘big move’ to The Hive by developing electronic indexes from our paper slip indexes. Examples are inputting into huge databases such as the Marriage Licence Indexes and Absent Voters for the Great War. Many of these indexes are now on our website to the benefit of users all across the world. We also have some new indexes that are being developed, for example Warwickshire parishes in Worcestershire’s Bishop’s Transcripts.
Several of our volunteers are working with our photographic collections and so far over 3000 slides have been indexed by place and name; microfiche of specific collections are in the process of being indexed and one volunteer has listed, mounted and labelled over seven hundred photographs deposited by the Education Department. The original photographs held in the Centre are also being made ready to amalgamate with the main Worcestershire Photographic Survey held at the County Hall Branch when we combine as one service at The Hive.
One of our volunteers who likes to work from home undertook a major project to enter the index of Worcester City Monumental Inscriptions, which was on loan from Worcester City Council, into electronic format. Volunteers have also helped out at some of our events for example, the showing of ‘Worcestershire on film’ at the Swan Theatre and other venues.
We would like to give a big thank you and say how very grateful we are to volunteers past and present for their unstinting support over the years. They have allowed the Office to proceed quickly with work that otherwise would have taken years to complete. We sincerely hope we will have their continued support for many years to come.
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