Volunteering

Volunteers may be involved in a range of different activities. One of the Archive's recent volunteer projects involved repackaging building plans, taking them out of their old envelopes and putting them in new archival quality envelopes, to ensure their long-term preservation. Other projects have involved transcription of documents, indexing, sorting and listing, and we have completed a major project to sort, repackage and re-list an important collection of architectural drawings.

A group of volunteers were also specially recruited to help with the cataloguing project 'Bath, Water and World Heritage' . These volunteers were engaged on tasks such as cleaning and sorting volumes and plans, listing long series of files, and repackaging. 

Local Studies also has a small number of volunteers currently updating the catalogues for some of our manuscripts and printed books to make them more accessible to researchers. There is a long-term project to list our valuable collection of music from the late Georgian period which is poorly catalogued and under-used. 

Although at present we have a full complement of volunteers, opportunities do become available from time to time and we welcome enquiries from those who are interested. No prior experience of working in an archive is necessary but we are looking for people who have an interest in archives and history, a good basic level of education, attention to detail, the ability to handle documents carefully, and the ability to work as part of a team. Time commitments are flexible - you can offer as much or as little time as you can spare, anything from half a day to two and a half days per week. We will provide specific training and will do our best to match volunteers’ skills and interests with the different tasks in hand. Tea, coffee and biscuits will also be supplied!