Many different groups, individuals and organisations across the state hold incredible Queensland heritage items, and the State Library offers programs and resources to the stewards of this distributed collection of Queensland memory to help preserve and make their content accessible.
As the final part of the Connected Collections project, late last year State Library partnered with Sunshine Coast Council to run a pilot program of workshops with heritage organisations in the region.
Participants attend Connecting Collections digitisation training, Nov – Dec 2014
This workshop program comprised five days of training across November and December 2014. Participants described their collections, and the work they do to promote them, using the STACK framework (Stuff; Tools; Advocacy, Capacity; new Knowledge). The group also built skills in digitising and sharing their collection items online, and strengthened connections across the regional heritage network of the Sunshine Coast.
Staff of State Library worked with dedicated and very knowledgeable participants from:
- Bli Bli on Maroochy Historical Society
- Buderim Historical Society
- Discover Eumundi Heritage and Visitor Centre
- Friends of Bankfoot House
- Landsborough Museum / Landsborough District Historical Society
- Peachester History Committee
- Noosa Library Service
- Sunshine Coast Heritage Libraries
Participants swapping skills and information with each other created a great collaborative atmosphere for the workshops – we saw groups with an active presence in social media work with others to bring them up to speed, for example.
To put the skills into practice, the group chose some practical projects to which everyone could contribute their newly-digitised content. With an agreed theme of ‘changing landscapes of the Sunshine Coast’, everyone contributed to a Historypin collection and put together some blog posts about their region. Over the next few weeks we will be posting some of the Sunshine Coast articles written by project participants.
The workshop program and feedback from participants are now being put to use in developing the next training program State Library is running in March 2014 as part of the project From Selection to Discovery.
Penelope Lau – Senior Project Officer, State Library of Queensland