#CrowdCymru digital archives volunteer project

In this guest post, Jennifer Evans, Digital Volunteering Project Officer for #CrowdCymru gives an overview of this crowdsourced digital archive project.

Hello there, I’m Project Officer on a very exciting digital archives volunteer project funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and run jointly by Gwent Archives, Glamorgan Archives and Cardiff University Special Collections & Archives.

The idea for the project was born from a need to demonstrate that these project partners were endeavouring to taking a swift, proactive, and collaborative approach to modernise their services to meet the ambitious roadmap of the Welsh Government’s Digital Strategy of Wales which aims to “improve the lives of everyone through collaboration, innovation and better public services”. Moreover, the pandemic has forced archive services to revisit their purpose, reach and value, and adapt their services within a broader local, national, and international context. This project will equip more people with the digital skills they now need to remain well-connected across their communities and to develop these skills to take full advantage in seeking opportunities in the workplace and for wellbeing. We also aim to transform opportunities for archives services to develop new models for remote volunteering without the need to travel that support the Welsh Government’s ambition to reduce our carbon footprint.

All the work our volunteers do is accessed via a crowdsourcing platform established by those very clever people at the National Library Wales. This fully bilingual online platform enables remote volunteers to tag and transcribe the digital heritage collections held within these repositories.

Archive services across Wales hold millions of irreplaceable records, but many are only minimally catalogued and therefore difficult to identify and find. This project is harnessing the knowledge of individuals in communities across Wales and beyond to enrich our collective heritage for the benefit of current and future generations - locally, nationally, and globally. 

Our volunteer numbers currently stand at ninety and although the majority come from Wales, we also have sign-ups from USA, Canada, Australia & South Korea! The work they have so valiantly been ploughing through began with transcribing handwritten documents and now they’ve moved on to tagging and describing photographs. The project partners were careful to ensure that the collections put forward would be varied and interesting enough to keep everyone engrossed and they have kept true to their word with some absolute corkers!

Optometry class circa 1970 Cardiff University Institutional Archive [Cardiff University Special Collections & Archives]

Cardiff University Special Collections & Archives started the ball rolling with two wonderful collections for transcription. The first was the Edward Thomas Literary Archive, just under 500 letters written by Thomas to his friends and family. Poet, critic, and biographer, Thomas wrote all his poetry over a brief three-year span, 1914–17. During the second year of WWI, he enlisted and was killed two years later in the Battle of Arras. Even though everyone struggled with Thomas’s handwriting, they smashed through this collection within a few months, many finding the content powerful and moving.

Edward Thomas Literary Archive [Cardiff University Special Collections & Archives]

The next collection was nine war time diaries written by Priscilla Scott-Ellis, daughter of the 8th Lord Howard de Walden. Brought up in the luxury of Belgrave Square, London, and Chirk Castle, in Wexham, what makes Priscilla exceptional is that she volunteered as a nurse during both the Spanish Civil War and WWII. Moreover, whereas her Spanish Civil War diaries were posthumously published in 1995 as The Chances of Death: Diary of the Spanish Civil War, her WWII diaries have never been published, making this a very important transcription project. Fortunately for everyone, Priscilla’s handwriting is much easier to read, and they’ve pretty much finished this collection also. As well as transcribing these letters and diaries, the volunteers have also been tagging names and places, to make searching these documents much easier in the future.

Glamorgan Archives offered up our first photographic collection with the Cardiff Dockland Community Collection. These portraits of individuals and groups including women and children, from the Cardiff dockland community, were taken between 1900-1920. This area was commonly known as "Tiger Bay” and became one of the UK's first multicultural communities with people from over 50 countries, including Somalia, Yemen, and Greece, settled here by the outbreak of the First World War, working in the docks and allied industries.

Cardiff Docklands Community Collection [Glamorgan Archives]

Gwent Archives added the Newport Rugby & Athletic Club photographic archive charting the history of the club and containing images of groups, teams, committee members, sports days and some wonderfully random early 1900s images of children playing in snow, men in plus fours skating on frozen lakes and scantily clad lads diving into dangerous canal locks!

Children playing in the snow circa 1902, Newport Rugby and Athletics Club [Gwent Archives]

Heather Brewer and Jennifer Middleton 1950, Newport Rugby & Athletics Club Archive [Gwent Archives]

For these collections, the volunteers are tagging anything they see in the photograph and describing the image.

The next collection about to be added from Gwent Archives is a series of “Letters Books” related to the Poor Law Act of 1834. All correspondence carried out between the local Poor Law offices and the main Head Office in London was re-written into letters books as legal copy. Gwent Archives have chosen the letters books from the Abergavenny Board of Guardians for this project. This transcription task will be a challenge indeed as the pages on which the letters were re-written are very thin and there is a lot of bleed-through. Fortunately, only a synopsis of these letters is required as opposed to a full transcription, so volunteers need only read through and type up a summary.

One of my core jobs as Project Officer has been to promote the project and this has been achieved using several methods. We have an active Twitter [X] account to promote progress, highlight these great collections and foster support for other archive, library, museums, and heritage accounts. We had live listings on websites such as Adult Learners Week Wales , Black History Wales and World Digital Preservation Day. We have been featured in numerous publications including the January 2023 issue of Who Do You Think You Are Magazine and the March/April 2023 issue of Archive & Records Association Members Magazine [ARC]. We have been supported by the Archives and Records Council Wales, with invitations to speak at their Annual Forums and to contribute a series of blog posts to their website reporting on our progress [enter CrowdCymru in the home page search box to find them]. We recorded a podcast for The Archives & Records Association, who have recorded lots of fascinating interviews from people who work with archives for their Outside the Box series. As part of Volunteer Week, they recorded some volunteer specials and Crowd Cymru was one of them, you can listen to the episode here.

We’ve also ventured out into the community, both in person and online, to spread the word and encourage people to sign up. We presented to organisations including Digital Communities Wales, U3A Wales, Newport City Council [Community & Regeneration and Community Arts], Aberystwyth University [Online and Distance Learning, Information and Library Studies and Lifelong Learning Genealogy Groups] and Glamorgan Archives and Gwent Archives as part of their series of online public talks.

Project Officer at Dementia Awareness Day, St Fagans Museum of National History

Interestingly it was the presentation to Gwent Archives that sparked a very productive tangent as the talk was attended by the Dementia Voice Lead on Amgueddfa Cymru’s Museums Inspiring Memories Project. This three-year project in partnership with Alzheimer’s Society Cymru and funded by the National Lottery Community Fund began back in April 2022. The projects aim is to work with people living with dementia, unpaid carers, carer sector staff, heritage sector colleagues, and related communities and organisations, to deliver practical ways to engage with and improve the quality of life of people affected by dementia, through access to museum resources and sites. After the talk, the Lead made contact and a dialogue was initiated around the benefits of transcribing and tagging as memory work for those with conditions like dementia. We were then invited to attend their Dementia Awareness Day, run in conjunction with Dementia Action Week at St Fagans Museum of National History in May 2023. Our meet and greet table was in amongst a host of other organisations including Alzheimers Society Cymru, Ty Hapus, Welsh Ambulance Services, Dewis Cymru and Age Cymru. This extremely productive day was spent learning about the work these organisations do while also interacting with individuals and groups brought from care homes by showing them the photographs on our table and asking questions. One very elderly lady with bad eyesight was understandably dismissive when shown one of the Cardiff Dockland Community photographs but once her carer had explained the issue, the image was described in detail to her. She immediately brightened and began to talk about how she remembered the immigrants who arrived in Tiger Bay and how they were seen as different in how they dressed and spoke. She remembered animosity and suspicion but more so that her mother went out of her way to be friendly and kind, telling her to do the same in the school playground. This moving interaction really was a highlight of the day.

This train of thought then lead to contact with Cardiff Council Wellbeing Support Service, established to boost the health and wellbeing of the community and ease some of the negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their aim is to provide opportunities to help those experiencing mental health challenges, social isolation and loneliness and anxiety around leaving the home as this number has risen significantly since the pandemic. This incredibly supportive and accommodating team have embraced Crowd Cymru as an opportunity for socialising and learning for their clients. This has led to a series of in person workshops in hubs and libraries around Cardiff which have been great fun.  

Our project ends on November 30 and thoughts of review reports and output tables now need to be considered. But, on a more personal level, one of the most enjoyable aspects of this project for me has been recruiting and getting to know our wonderfully diverse group of volunteers. I email them every week, provide online training sessions, and manage a closed Facebook Group for us all to chat to one-another. Their friendliness, experience, and enthusiasm to support the work of archives services has been a joy and I know that the next three months are going to fly by, so I intend to make the most of every minute.  

I have also been overwhelmed by the sheer generosity of this heritage archives environment and sector. This project has been met, at every request, with offers of help and support and a true sense of working together supporting individual endeavours for the greater good of the whole sector. How wonderful to be part of such a great community.

Jennifer Evans

Digital Volunteering Project Officer

Twitter: @CrowdCymru

Phone: 01495 742450

Email: jennifer.evans@gwentarchives.gov.uk             

This blog post titled #CrowdCymru by Jennifer Evans is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License