Well although the official end to the project was on March 31, we continue to work – or should I say volunteer? Either way it is lovely to be able to continue working with these archives and new discoveries continue to be made.
At the moment we are uploading information to Peoples Collection Wales (PCW) together with the images to match. Hook Local History Society was the first to be uploaded and all went well! I followed this with Llangwm, Penally and the last one to will be Coastlands where we will upload part of the HMS Harrier archive from one of their members. So with each individual society’s it has been fascinating to upload part of their archives and to find out more about their areas. Penally and Coastlands both have archived part of their history as military history but how different. The area around Dale was a Royal Naval shore establishment for radar research and training. The Coastlands archive reflecting this shows the aftermath of World War 2 clearly whereas Penally has information surrounding World War 1 although it is still used as a military camp.
So we are busy checking the input to PCW and then uploading. It is checking that takes the time and with David being the second pair of eyes this is now achieved by Zoom! After the society’s have had their work checked the upload is very easy and quick. The images and text that we upload are quickly available and it is lovely to see them as they then become available on an international basis!
As well as finding out about more of this fantastic county’s history there is also the opportunity to meet with people involved in this project – these can be people from the societies and it has been so interesting to work with their archives and to talk to them about their area – always something to learn. The other side of this project is to work with the technical people from peoples Collection wales and learn from them about how the technical processes back up what we are trying to achieve. There is always something to learn!