The Herald Digital Archive Project is seeking two new steering group members to help drive forward the project to digitise more than 130 years of local history immortalised in the pages of the Herald newspaper series.

The project team, supported by a dedicated band of volunteers, has already completed an inventory of more than 350,000 pages of newsprint which it hopes to digitise and make available to the public.

This digitisation is likely to be reliant on a sizeable bid to the National Lottery Heritage Fund, which has two key requirements for success: fundraising and bid management, and community engagement and benefit, including hard-to-reach groups.

To achieve these goals, the steering group is seeking to bring two additional volunteers with past experience and expertise on to the project committee to work closely together and lead in each of the two areas. 

Both roles are outlined in more detail as follows:

The Fundraising and Bid Management Lead will take the estimated digitisation and five-year access and support costs as the target for fundraising and develop an outline for where the funding might come from, such as local businesses, community fairs and events, charitable bodies and National Lottery funding, and what the relative percentages might be.

From this, they will establish a plan and timeline for raising the required sums, and the resources required to execute it. They will work with the Community Engagement Lead to resource the activities and support outreach through local groups and lead the bid writing and submission.

The Community Engagement Lead will articulate the various segments of the community covered by the archive geography and the benefits likely to be derived from the project.

They will develop a demonstrable engagement plan based on this, including businesses, schools, colleges, the elderly and hard-to-reach groups and lead the activities to execute on it.

They will lead the recruitment and deployment of the volunteers who can help to bring the archive to life through museum exhibitions, local fairs and events and other activities. 

They will show how the benefits of the digitisation, and the funding to support it, will be realised and follow through on the measurement of success.

We encourage interested parties to apply for these positions and become a part of this exciting project to preserve our local history for future generations.

To apply, please email a letter of interest and CV to the [email protected] by midday on Thursday, April 27.