Are you interested in archives and history?
Looking for new skills? The Made in Greater Manchester project is a new Heritage Lottery funded project which aims to develop a new online catalogue of local business records across Greater Manchester. We are looking for volunteers to help list, digitise and tell stories about our business archives.
What will I be doing?
- Simple cataloguing and listing of important business archives in order to make them accessible to the public.
- Digitising and transcribing key items from the business archives and publishing them online.
- Contributing to a book of volunteer-researched articles about local business histories.
- Contributing short blog posts to the Made in Greater Manchester blog.
- Curating blog posts using oral history interviews to tell stories about working in Greater Manchester
What will I get from volunteering?
- Gaining experience of working with archives.
- Acquiring basic archival skills and a good knowledge of how an archive service operates.
- Opportunity to increase self-confidence.
- Opportunity to meet new people.
- Valuable training and experience that can be included in CVs and job applications.
- Gaining IT, blogging and research skills (some of the tasks can be done remotely)
- Opportunity to share your knowledge.
How do I apply?
Please fill in the online expression of interest form. We’ll then get in touch with you, introduce you to the collections and show you round the library.
What collections will I be working with?
At Manchester Central Library we have selected three archive collections to get the project started. These are the Manchester Ship Canal plans, Petrie and McNaught Ltd (a steam engine-making subsidiery of Renold plc) and the Bradford Pit Project oral history interviews.
Each collection is different and offers a variety of types of engagement from digitisation to listing to digital storytelling. Look out for some detailed blog posts soon about all three collections!
GMStories 