Past to Present@ South Wales Miners Museum

The overall activities that will be supported as part of the Past to Present @ SWMM project will focus on the development and up-skilling of Volunteers at the Museum and marketing the new additions to the museums activities and interactive guided tours/walks. To maintain and ensure the success of this project, the museum will employ two officers; a Collections Officer (CO) and a Heritage Officer (HO). Through the success of this project, the museum will be able to increase volunteer participation by the sharing of best practice. 
 
 
These roles will play an instrumental part with the recruiting and retaining of volunteers as well as training and upskilling the volunteers. These posts have been funded by HLF. There will be a heavy focus of the recruitment of new volunteers. A fully integrated programme of volunteer training will be designed and implemented to ensure that new and existing volunteers are able to better care for and maintain the museums collection and resources, in compliance with SPECTRUM, the international and national standard for museum collection and management. 
 
 
This will consist of the creation of a volunteer museum collection team who will appropriately care for the collection and will work on rotation and back log the museum collection. Volunteers will receive training on how to access and upload all information and interpretative content via WI-FI onto the IPS that will be located at key location along the innovative interactive walks. Through the maintenance of our artefacts and enable volunteers to give innovative and informative guided walks using exciting digital technology, the content can be changed regularly and will integrate the information gathered by the community and local schools in order to make the experience more interactive and personal. 
 
 
 
This will go on to increase the skills learned by local volunteers and visitors and will encourage participants to take ownership of projects within the museum. This will be an opportunity for the museum to not only increase the visitor numbers and the diversity of these visits, but to also improve its volunteer and community participation through personal engagement in local projects. The museum will look into encouraging all participants from different backgrounds by promoting community engagement and outdoor activity with the guided walks and also create a greater sense of appreciation of the local history through the recording of stories and the handling of artefacts. Offering this project to local volunteers, it will add value to their local identity and promote natural and cultural heritage resources, something that does not yet exist within the Afan Valley. 
 
 
 
 
Currently the volunteers of the museum are an aging generation. Their knowledge and experience will be lost unless the museum acts now through recruiting new volunteers to pass on local knowledge and understanding of the history of the South Wales Miners Museum.

 

Project details

Funding amount:
£20,000
Funding source:
LEADER Local Development Fund
Area:
Neath Port Talbot
Completion:
Theme:
1
Measure:
19.2
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Past to Present@ South Wales Miners’ Museum Case Study

Contact:

Name:
William Sims
Telephone number:
01639 851833
Email project contact
Project website:
http://south-wales-miners-muesum.co.uk

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