Mansfield Museum volunteer’s Collection Interpretations go Viral

Mansfield Museum Volunteers have been very busy recording recently. Community Participation Officer, Sally Evans, attended the Museum Development East Midlands Digital Strategies programe Audio Recording workshop at The Workhouse, Southwell.

Sally picked up lots of useful tips on interviewing and recording from sounddelivery’s Jude Habib.

Sally was eager to start sharing the ideas she’d picked up with her team of volunteers straight away. “The very next day, I asked a few of them to go into the archive and pick out objects that interested them.”

Focusing on the Museum’s industry collections, they picked out a diverse range of items, including a bottle of whisky distilled in Mansfield in 1912. “They all wrote about each item, how it made them feel, why they were drawn to it and so on.” Then we recorded segments of each volunteer talking about their choices.

The recordings, all less than a minute long, are then uploaded to the Mansfield Museum Volunteers audioboo page. The series is called ‘Volunteer Finds’ and gets shared on other social media. “We’re aiming to post at least one a week” says Sally. “The idea is that as our volunteers grow more confident, they’ll record a snippet whenever they find something that really interests them, without any prompting from me.”

Martin Ellis, a recent volunteer recruit, created the first recording posted to audioboo; a piece about a Mansfield Brewery Millennium Ale special edition bottle and tin. “There’s so much interesting stuff in the archives, it’s great to have the freedom to take a closer look at things and share our ideas” said Martin.

“The workshop was really useful in highlighting that even simple, short segments of audio can be a fantastic way of engaging our audience and our volunteers” says Sally. “And it’s so quick and easy to do!”

Twitter: @MMVolunteers

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mansfieldmuseumvolunteers

Audioboo: https://audioboo.fm/MMVolunteers