Volunteers day 2022
On Friday 10 June we were delighted to host an open day for our volunteers, the first opportunity for us to get together in person since the start of the pandemic in 2020. This was an informal drop-in session held on a Friday when we were closed to the public. In time-honoured LMA tradition we ate cake, drank tea and caught up with volunteers who have worked with us for many years, and we also had the opportunity to meet – in person – some of our new cohort of digital volunteers.
Like many other archive services, LMA has a long history of working with volunteers. Before the outbreak of Covid our volunteers worked on site. Volunteers (who regularly feature in this newsletter) work with the Collections and Conservation teams to improve our cataloguing, compile indexes, transcribe records and repackage collections. Volunteers also help with the time-consuming jobs of cleaning and numbering items and describing and digitising audio material.
Since the pandemic, social distancing regulations and changes to our working environment meant we could not welcome back volunteers as soon as we reopened to the public, and we have worked carefully to manage this process. Our open day was a chance to catch up and show our volunteers what has changed at LMA, most notably in the form of our new Director Emma who gave a warm welcome to the volunteers. It was also an opportunity to highlight our popular Magnificent Maps exhibition with a series of tours from curator Sharon Tuff.
During the lockdown period LMA launched two remote volunteering projects which do not require volunteers to attend LMA but have enabled people to work from the comfort (and safety) of home. Firstly, we launched a project to enhance the descriptions of our enormous collection of London County Council street photographs (our SC/PHL/01 series), which has proved very popular and is greatly enriching the descriptions of our photographs on the London Picture Archive. Secondly, we launched our Switching the Lens project, in which volunteers search digitised parish registers using Ancestry to identify Londoners of African, Asian and Caribbean heritage, important research which is being used to understand more about the history of London’s communities. For our remote volunteers, this open day was for many a first chance to visit LMA and see what happens onsite, to go behind the scenes and meet the staff running the projects – it was lovely to put faces to email addresses at last! Of course, some of our remote volunteers are remote in the truest sense, and these projects will continue in digital form.
The day also offered a chance for volunteers to see the type of volunteering projects that LMA currently offers, in case they wanted to try something new. Our conservator Tim Warrender gave a demonstration of cleaning some Foundling Hospital apprenticeship registers, and archivist David Baldwin talked to attendees about current opportunities for volunteers to work on LMA’s varied sound archives (giving us a blast of 1980s reggae in the process). Volunteer Suzanne Burge was on hand to discuss the long-running Place in the Sun fire insurance indexing project, and myself and archivist Dorota Pomorska-Dawid showed remote volunteers the original records (photographs and parish registers) that they have been working on in digital form. Already, some volunteers have been trying their hand at new opportunities across LMA.
If you are interested in volunteering at LMA – remotely or in person – you are welcome to contact us to discuss the types of opportunities available. New volunteer opportunities are usually advertised in this newsletter, as well as through our social media feeds.