Setting up a community archive

It’s important to have a clear reference base of your recordings and also any documents, photographs and artefacts that have been loaned or donated to the project.

At Porthcurno Telegraph Museum we have bolted the community history project onto the museum’s collection policy. Items on a long term loan or which have been donated are given an ‘entry’ number which gives a reference number for the museum or group's overall collection of artefacts.
We have a separate database for the community history collection which has been set up with ease of access in mind. This enables visitors to the centre to search for things themselves if they so wish.

A password is used to gain access to the database and then there are two strands of information on separate forms for each entry. There is a shortened version which gives an outline of the object or collection of photographs and then there is a longer version with greater detail about the item(s). It also gives information about the item’s condition and its storage location.

We have a collection of photographs which have been simply lent by their owners for scanning and then returned immediately. We have a list of these disks and an overview of their contents and will shortly be working on making this collection more easily accessible to visitors to the community history centre.

Two members of the Local History Project looking through historical books of the parish of St. Levan.

Image: Working on the community archive

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