Volunteer Week - Explore Your Archive volunteer - Randeep Atwal

For volunteer week this year we are hosting guest blogs by Explore Your Archive volunteers as the campaign celebrates its 10th anniversary. Randeep Atwal - EYA’s twitter/X volunteer writes our second guest blog:

I first became aware of the Explore Your Archive campaign at the end of 2020 when I was looking for voluntary experience in the archive sector. The campaign was advertising for social media officers and I was drawn to the opportunity as I felt it would be useful to gain experience in social media and outreach. The COVID-19 pandemic was ongoing and many archive services were closed but were using social media to continue to connect with their users so it seemed like a really interesting time to join a campaign with social media marketing as the focus.

My role covers monitoring the campaign’s X (formerly Twitter) account which involves posting our monthly social media themes and engaging with the posts of social media users with retweets and likes. I also promote material from our website which is the engine room of the campaign and we post regularly regarding our blog page and Spotlight pages which give heritage organisations the opportunity to provide updates on their projects and promote their services. We also promote a branding toolkit to help archives engage in the campaign. One highlight for the social media part of the campaign is our Focus Week which normally takes place in November. Our social media activity ramps up a level and it’s a brilliant opportunity to engage with social media users inside and outside the archive sector.

I continue to volunteer because I enjoy seeing what other archives are doing and I like seeing different heritage services coming together especially during our Focus Week. The campaign has introduced me to a lot of interesting resources and I really enjoy reading the Spotlight pages in particular, as they provide a lot more detail on collections that I hadn’t been familiar with before. It greatly helps that it is quite easy to fit the role around work and life commitments as you can easily check social media when you’re on the move and there is a bank of resources and support we can draw from to keep everything moving.

I’ve personally got a lot out of the role in terms of becoming familiar with how social media can be used for outreach and promotion as well as how a campaign of this size can work. I’ve been able to use many of the skills I have gained in my role as an archive assistant for a national collection as it’s provided a good understanding of what works on social media and of course getting involved in the campaign to promote the archive service. I’ve also really enjoyed getting to meet other volunteers on the campaign which has been useful for networking and a good opportunity to compare notes and chat with other archive professionals and volunteers.