We are now five months into Made in Greater Manchester, and incredibly over 40 volunteers have already got involved with the project!

Over the last few months many of the MIGM volunteers have taken the opportunity to attend our three project training sessions – cataloguing, digitisation and blogging.

The cataloguing training was led by the brilliant Jo Robson, who is the Archive Officer at Oldham Local Studies and Archives.

During this training session, the volunteers learnt how to catalogue and describe archive items to the Greater Manchester Archives and Local Studies Partnership cataloguing standard. They were able to get to grips with the theoretical part of cataloguing, and then apply what they had learnt to various practical situations.

The training session was also a fantastic opportunity for the volunteers to meet others involved in the project for the first time!

The second training session, digitisation, was conducted by Jamie from the University of Manchester’s Centre for Heritage Imaging and Collection Care (CHICC).

Jamie gave the volunteers a brilliant overview of what the CHICC does and the projects with which they are currently involved. He also gave a fascinating insight into some of their Advanced Imaging Techniques, including multispectral imaging and experiments in imaging gold!

Jamie then went over object handling, camera settings, lighting, computer software, image editing, and metadata, all of which will be very useful when the volunteers start digitising items from their collection.

csyzwqxw8aajtri

The third session was the blogging training, led by Hayley from Wehearttech C.I.C.

Hayley gave an interesting and informative introduction to Word Press and blogging with a particular focus on heritage blogging. She also covered various writing techniques for attracting and engaging readers, as well as the best ways to structure a blog to enhance its readability.

By the end of the session, all of the volunteers had managed to write and upload their own blog posts to WordPress!

I would like to give a massive thank you to our training coordinators Jo, Jamie and Hayley for running the training sessions, and to all of our fantastic MIGM volunteers for taking part.

I hope that the skills and knowledge that our volunteers have gained through these training sessions will be developed upon further over the duration of this project, and that they will continue to be of value to the volunteers in the future.

 

P.S. Our project volunteers will be putting their newfound blogging skills to the test over the next few months and documenting their project progress, so make sure you check back soon!