Our Volunteers

Volunteers play an important role within our service, working alongside our staff to:

• add information about the items we hold to our catalogue
• create indexes to make it easier for people to access our most popular records
• repackage collections to make sure they are ready for long term preservation
• promote and share information about our collections via our blog and social media channels

Our volunteers come from a variety of backgrounds and bring a wealth of experience, knowledge and dedication to the service. In return we offer the opportunity to be part of our team, to learn more about Cheshire and its written heritage and to pick up or practise new skills.

Onsite volunteer projects

Examples of current onsite volunteer projects are:

• cleaning and packaging of Cheshire marriage licences
• helping to catalogue pamphlets from the Local Studies collection
• creating name indexes for our Winwick Asylum case books
• helping to list microfiche building control plans
• creating indexes to our Valuation Office Survey records
• contributing to our blog

 Remote volunteering projects

We have two ongoing remote volunteering opportunities:

1. Parkside Asylum Project. Using the Zooniverse platform, volunteers are indexing patient case notes from our Parkside Asylum collection so that the data can easily be searched and analysed.
2. Medieval Deeds Project. Volunteers are extracting key information from our Latin medieval deeds. Strong Latin skills and the ability to read old handwriting are needed for this project!

Please get in touch if you’d like more information about either of these projects. 

Interested in becoming a volunteer?

If you are interested in volunteering at Cheshire Archives and Local Studies please contact us. We will ask you to complete a short form or to send us a copy of your CV if you have one.  We like to make sure that our volunteers are given projects that suit their skills, needs, experience and future goals, so if there is something in particular that you’d like to do then let us know!

Our current volunteer days are Mondays and Fridays. We ask for a minimum commitment of half a day per week.

Work experience

We offer a small number of work experience placements a year. We aim to cover the full range of activities of an archive and local studies service during this period.

Please note that we are only able to take on students under the age of 16 if the placement has been organised by their school.