Planning a community archives heritage project

Gloucestershire Archives offers a free initial session to groups in Gloucestershire and South Gloucestershire to discuss your ideas and help you develop your plan. Please get in touch with us if you are interested.

Before you start your project planning, you will be thinking about what you want to achieve and who your project is for. You may already have offers of help from your community but what about other people or organisations with whom you could work? Are you going to manage the project yourself or do you need a team?

There are other things to bear in mind at this early stage. For example, if you want to create digital records and publish material online, you must make sure that you comply with copyright and data protection laws. It's much easier if you get it right at the start.

Why not meet up with the Gloucestershire Archives team?  We can advise on partnerships and sources of funding, working with volunteers, creating and preserving digital project records, copyright and data protection issues, and much more. 

There are several useful websites for you to explore too. The Community Archives and Heritage Group and Runcoco (see the links to the right) both aim to encourage community archive projects with free advice and support. Their sites contain lots of useful information and case studies - plenty of ideas to get you started.