Larkhill's Royal Artillery Museum calling for more ‘essential’ volunteers
There's currently a team of 30 and a variety of roles are available
Larkhill-based Royal Artillery Museum is asking for more ‘essential’ volunteers to help them.
There is currently a team of 30 volunteers aiding the works around the museum, but more are still needed.
Museum manager Martin Harvey says the museum couldn’t do what it does without them:
“We are a small charity that looks after one of the biggest army museum collections in the country and the volunteers are essential for us to do what we do.”
How you can help
No specialist skills or knowledge are required, and Martin says there is a role for everyone.
He said: “For people who are a bit more hands on, we’ve got volunteers in our Conservation workshop, where they’re helping us to look after some of the pieces from the collection.
“Quite often that might be light maintenance, some cleaning right through to if we've got people who want to get involved more in the engineering side of things really taking things apart and putting back together again.
“We also have volunteers in other parts of a collection, so they're cataloguing objects, helping us to bring new donations into the collection and a big area of volunteering is in our archives and library.
“The archives and library are really busy. Every month our volunteers are helping to research and to answer those historical inquiries as well as helping us to make sure that everything in the archive is properly catalogued and well organized so people can find the many historical documents and photographs that we that we hold.”
Volunteers part of major projects
People giving up their own time plays a crucial role in putting together projects within the museum.
One such recent project was the World War 1 Diaries project, which Martin called an “amazing effort” by the volunteers.
“They spent a lot of time identifying all of the World War One material in our historical archive, and that was as part of a larger project that was based on digitizing World War One material to make it more widely accessible to the public.”
And that’s not the only example, as volunteers act as tour guides for the current displays on the days when the museum is open to the public, which currently isn’t every day, due to the construction of a future museum.