Digital Heritage Hub Search

In 2022-23, 17 heritage organisations took part in the Digital Volunteering programme that was funded as part of the National Lottery Heritage Fund’s Digital Skills for Heritage initiative. Some of these organisations used Google and Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp) advertising to recruit volunteers to work remotely on digital projects. This ‘how to’ guide shares the process, learning and challenges of using Google and Meta Ads to recruit volunteers.

The #CrowdCymru digital archives volunteer project was jointly run by Gwent Archives, Glamorgan Archives and Cardiff University & Special Collections. Using a newly created bi-lingual online platform developed by the National Library of Wales, #CrowdCymru invited volunteers to tag, index and transcribe documents to make them more accessible for researchers.  Although the majority of the remote volunteers came from Wales, there were also sign-ups from USA, Canada, Australia and South Korea.

The Portland Museum is dedicated to working with its local community to protect and promote the unique heritage of the Isle of Portland in Dorset. Over the past five years, the museum has used advances in digital technology across the arts and heritage sectors to create new ways for people to engage with its collections. The museum used its Earl of Abergaveny Collection to train and support volunteers to produce 3D digital models of shipwreck items from this collection to create a digital archive.

Torre Abbey is Torbay’s most historic building complex dating from 1196. A Scheduled Monument set in 17.8 acres of land it’s been a centre of religious and artistic expression and hospitality for 800 years. It’s also an accredited museum home to an important collection. The focus of this project was to train a team of volunteers to help digitise Torre Abbey’s collection providing valuable wellbeing opportunities to the local community as well as teaching new digital skills such as scanning artworks and database entry.

CollabArchive is a digital volunteering project led by the Nerve Centre and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) and funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. The project connects new and diverse audiences with archive heritage through creativity and digital technologies, leading to sustained volunteering opportunities at PRONI.

The Portland Museum is dedicated to working with its local community to protect and promote the unique heritage of the Isle of Portland in Dorset. Over the past five years, the museum has used advances in digital technology across the arts and heritage sectors to create new ways for people to engage with its collections. This resource explains how the museum trained and supported volunteers to produce 3D digital models of items from its collection.

New technology allows us to discover and map previously unknown examples of archaeological sites. Working with a team of 60+ volunteers, the Unlocking Landscapes project used open-access software and remote sensing data to undertake a systematic search for new archaeological sites across all 638 parishes of Devon and Cornwall.

As part of VocalEyes’s Heritage Access 2022 project, 61 digital volunteers were recruited from across the UK to assess the websites of over 3,000 museum and heritage sites, checking both accessibility of the site and the access information each organisation provides to support and enable visits to their venue by D/deaf, disabled and neurodivergent people. The project actively recruited volunteers with personal experience of access barriers.

The Heritage Trust Network’s Digital Heroes Project connected young volunteers aged 18-30 with heritage organisations across the UK to provide digital support. Partnering with youth insight agency BeatFreeks and The Audience Agency, the Heritage Trust Network recruited, trained, and matched 50 volunteer Digital Heroes with 50 of its members. The Digital Heroes had placements of 40 hours with the organisations they were matched with, supporting on tasks including updating websites, creating digital content, advising on social media campaigns, and devising digital fundraising or marketing strategies.

The Royal Horticultural Society’s Digital Dig is a virtual volunteering project, with more than 165 volunteers helping the UK uncover and document its hidden horticultural history. The project has helped uncover and document hidden horticultural history through three distinct volunteering programmes: Transcribers, Geotaggers and Digital Ambassadors and has created digital resources that will make this previously inaccessible collection widely available to online users.

To capture Glasgow Women’s Library’s 30 year history a podcast series has been recorded with the support of digital volunteers to preserve institutional knowledge from organisational “elders” to help promote the library’s heritage and share the importance of the unique, grassroots nature of the organisation.

The Coleshill Auxiliary Research Team (CART) are a group of volunteer researchers and supporters who investigate and record the World War II Auxiliary Units across the UK. Working with volunteers this project created 360-degree virtual tours of the underground Operational Bases and other structures used by the Auxiliary Units digitally capturing many of the remaining sites in various states of preservation.

Museums visitors are now much more willing to use their phones to access digital content to enhance their visitor experience. The technology to deliver this can be cheap and easy: a simple mobile-optimised website will do the job. But creating engaging content that’s tailored to visitor needs and attention patterns is challenging. Brighton and Hove Museums worked with volunteers to create a new audio guide for Preston Manor and a digital storytelling experiment in Brighton Museum & Art Gallery.

Plant Heritage is a small independent charity based in Surrey that operates throughout the UK and Ireland with the support of a large network of volunteers and supporters.  It records, researches, and preserves garden plants through the National Plant Collection Scheme and uses a custom web-interface database (Persephone) for managing its new collection records. Plant Heritage recruited digital volunteers to transfer older records — a mixture of formats from paper to Word and Excel documents — onto the Persephone database to ensure all their plant data is securely stored and improve their curatorial standards.

Plantlife International is a wild plant and fungi conservation charity. It’s four-year project Building Resilience in South West Woodlands (2018-2022) raised awareness of Atlantic woodlands across Cornwall, Devon and Somerset, as well as undertaking important management works to ensure the conservation of these habitats. As part of this project hundreds of 360-degree (fisheye) photographs were taken across several project sites. Digital volunteers were recruited to undertake the data analysis work in order for these photographs to be analysed.  This resource shares Plantlife’s journey in recruiting and managing these volunteers and their data work.

In 2022/23 Inverclyde Community Development Trust recruited volunteers to take part in Digital Heritage Research groups across Inverclyde (Greenock, Port Glasgow and Gourock) to uncover heritage gaps relating to Inverclyde’s history on Wikipedia and/or improve what’s already there. With Wikipedia training from Wikimedia professionals, volunteers had the opportunity to be involved in: research, creating and editing Wikipedia entries and sharing Inverclyde’s stories.

Barnsley Archives hold records relating to all aspects of life in the Borough of Barnsley and its collections include newspapers, books, sound and film. This project sought to engage and upskill remote digital volunteers to help Barnsley Archives and Local Studies interpret, digitally transcribe and publicly share recently acquired sound and film collections.

This guide explains why a skills audit is important for your organisation and provides guidance on how to identify where the skills gaps are and what support you might need. The resource includes an audit template which you can use to conduct your own analysis of your team’s existing digital skills.

The move towards digital has opened up many great opportunities for small to medium-sized heritage organisations to make a big impact, but also presents some challenges. Many heritage organisations rely on volunteers to operate and the digital skills of a volunteer team may be limited. This resource by Dig Yourself provides guidance on how to identify the digital training needs of your volunteers and how get started with digital upskilling with limited resources.

Technology can offer new ways of managing volunteers, a crucial asset in the heritage sector. This resource explores how digital tools can be used in the recruitment, screening, training and scheduling of your volunteers.