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What have our volunteers been up to?!
Wow – the first few months have flown by!
Our volunteers have been working on a variety of different projects at both the Co-operative Heritage Trust, Holyoake House and Rochdale Local Studies, Sparth. They have also learnt skills such as the right way to handle archives and books, using archives for research and techniques for cleaning and rehousing items.
At the CHT the volunteers have been looking at the Co-op News, cleaning Women’s Co-operative Guild papers and reviewing and rehousing a collection of Toad Lane Museum Material.
One of the volunteers is working on a recently discovered set of papers by William Cooper, one of the original Rochdale Pioneers and another has been digitising copies of the ‘Rochde Kronikul’ (Rochdale Chronicle), a dialect pamphlet from 1853 – its very difficult to read!
Over at Rochdale Local Studies the volunteers have been working extremely hard on the Co-operative archive – cleaning, listing and rehousing this extremely important collection.
They have seen how archives some archives come into the collection – in this case plastic bags! This gave them an opportunity to list and rehouse a brand new archive; the Gordon Chadwick Collection of Town Hall restoration photographs and papers.
The volunteers have also had the opportunity to develop specific interest such as Dialect writers and work and they have used the resources at Sparth to research these.
Without this essential work that they are doing to support the collections, we would not know what was in the collection and it would not be able to be used for research, creative or other purposes.
One of our volunteers also wrote a blog post on the CHT website, read it below!
Thanks to all our volunteers for their time and hard work this year!
CHT Blog