How did you get involved with your community group?  

The group was formed following a Jubilee celebration exhibition in Aldermaston Parish Hall in 2017, where a number of people had undertaken research on local history topics. It was felt that this research should be preserved and made easily available, so the idea of a digital archive evolved and was developed into a successful National Lottery bid for funds to develop a website. 

Aldermaston History Group is a non-profit membership group; we charge an annual subscription which is designed to cover the cost of website hosting and maintenance, and potential cost of speakers for our quarterly talks, hosted in a room generously provided free of charge by the local pub. 

How do you collect material for your collections?  

 Several members of the newly formed Aldermaston History Group had extensive physical archives which were uploaded to the website and items were allocated individual archive numbers. 

What processes are in place to manage and process your collections?  

Using the Lottery funds, Aldermaston History Group were able to commission CommunitySites to deliver a website, with elements of customised visual design, incorporating CommunitySites established cataloguing and search software. 

How do you preserve your collections?   

 CommunitySites have hosted the Aldermaston History website since its inception in 2019, including providing hosting upgrades. 

We have developed good working relationships with the team at the Royal Berkshire Archives, West Berkshire Heritage and other local history groups. We are currently evolving a donations policy to deal with physical artefacts which we are occasionally offered. 

How did you get involved with your community group? 

Having always worked with charities, Hannah applied for job with GDA because she liked the ethos of the organisation. When speaking to their CEO during the interview, she valued GDA’s approach to community development which is very human centred. Although GDA is focussed less on showing what has been created but more about what the members get out of their experience via capacity building. 

How do you collect material for your collections? 

Since GDA seeks to promote diversity by showing how activities can be accessible to a range of disabled individuals, the priority is the process of creating materials and how the individuals feel while doing it rather than the finished outputs.  

Where funding is available, these materials will be collected and are often for the purpose of writing funding applications, monitoring and evaluating reports for applications, documenting member testimony, etc. All sessions conducted by GDA will have PAs to help participants. The PAs take photographs as well as tutors and these are saved as a collection, often for the purpose of putting together their Learning Bulletin.  

What processes are in place to manage and process your collections? 

Since the outputs aren’t as important as the activity itself, GDA tries to encourage their members to take things home with them. Specific projects are documented because they are relevant to funding received. GDA store this in their digital database while they encourage members to retain the original. Unless the materials have a particularly strong message or have been provided funding to retain them, these will not be kept. 

The materials in the digital database are always clearly labelled with named folders and are often arranged by location and year. GDA often cross reference the materials in their database with the register of those who attended sessions.  

How do you preserve your collections?  

GDA have a server held in their office – the Digital Learning manager/co-ordinator will make sure that all relevant materials that are in scope are saved on the Cloud.  

The digital database is for internal use and not accessible externally since its primary purpose is for report writing.  

How did you get involved with your community group? 

I got involved with our community groups through personal interest and outreach efforts. I am the founder of Kirklees Local TV (https://kirkleeslocaltv.com/) and established the grassroots media production company in 2012 to celebrate, commemorate and educate the broader communities, public, private and voluntary sector services of the rich heritage social-cultural capital that exists in grassroots communities. Our primary goal is representation, inculcation, raising the profile of marginalised communitas and creating equitable opportunities in minority and low socio-economic challenged communities. 
 

Since 2012, we have involved over 700 volunteers in various projects. We now have over 4,500 videos and approximately 8,500 contributions to the website: blogs, articles, social media streams, podcasts, photographs and social media feeds.  

How do you collect material for your collections? 

Collecting material for our collections is an enjoyable, challenging and meticulous process. We employ several methods to gather relevant items: 

Donations: We receive donations from community members and local organisations who wish to contribute to KLTV’s platform. 

Fieldwork: Our volunteers engage in fieldwork, such as visiting historical sites or conducting interviews, to gather firsthand material for the website. 

Training & Development: We develop our volunteers in photography, videography, editing, oral history techniques, journalism and media, archiving, and digital preservation. 

What processes are in place to manage and process your collections? 

Our process of collecting and managing our collection is threefold: 

Acquisition: We first assess and acquire materials through the methods mentioned above. Each item is evaluated for relevance, condition, and authenticity before deciding how, who, and where we will store the new material.  

Cataloguing: Once an item is recorded, documented, or collected, it is meticulously catalogued in the KLTV archive. The process involves documenting its origin, condition, and other relevant information. Each item is assigned a unique identifier to ensure it can be easily located and referenced by our Chief Editor and others in the company. KLTV’s current archive content is available for viewing directly from the website and encompasses various documentaries, videos, podcasts, articles and images (https://kirkleeslocaltv.com/). 

Storage and Access: Finally, items are stored in a controlled environment to preserve their condition. We use specialised storage solutions tailored to the needs of different types of materials. We have a collection at the Heritage Quay Archive based at the University of Huddersfield (https://heritagequay.org/archives/WYA/?view=item) and with the Community Achieve Heritage Group (CAHG) as noted in their database as numbers 683 and 779. You can access the database here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1WmJ3H-ixDFRk1PmI8DXDYEiPR3h49x8r.  
 
The University of Huddersfield Heritage Quays has acid-free boxes for paper climate-controlled rooms for delicate artefacts. The university and CAHG provide access to our collection, which is managed through a digital database, allowing researchers to locate and request items for study. 

How do you preserve your collections? 

The Heritage Quay Archive based at the University of Huddersfield and the Community Achieve Heritage Group (CAHG) provide a range of guidance and support in the preservation of our collections.   The Heritage Quay Archive support our digital preservation work. Additionally, since 2020, we have built a healthy relationship with the West Yorkshire Archive Service, based at the West Yorkshire History Centre in Wakefield. They continually advise us on good practices when developing and preserving community archives. 

How did you get involved with your community group? 

Our focus is on the history of Bowburn, in County Durham, and surrounding area. Bowburn is a former colliery village, whose pit (Bowburn Colliery) produced coal from 1908 till 1967. 

How do you collect material for your collections? 

We have a dedicated room in the local Community Centre in which we have a collection of books, maps, photographs and memorabilia.  We have tried to digitise photographs, maps and written information, using a laptop belonging to the group. 

What processes are in place to manage and process your collections? 

The biggest challenges are technical know-how and funding – lack of, in both cases! – but also time. We rely on the goodwill of our small number of active members to maintain a   catalogue of what we have in our collection. We were recently (in 2023) helped by some volunteers from Durham University to restore order and update our catalogue, after a period of disorganisation during the pandemic.  This help was greatly appreciated. 

How do you preserve your collections? 

We have no particular strategy in place – just a hope that new members will in due course be recruited to carry on our work. 

Cybersecurity  Protecting your content from malicious attacks and viruses will become more important as you collect more content, particularly if you are collecting content from unknown donors or across the internet. In addition, it is important that you protect your collections and information held in online systems or on computers that other groups / people could get access to.

Passwords 

The first step in implementing good cyber security processes is to make sure you have good password controls in place. Tops tips for this are,  

• Every password should be different. Don’t use the same password on every platform. 

• Passwords should be between 9 and 15 characters long and include numbers and special characters like question marks or dashes.  

• Passwords should be changed regularly to make them harder to crack. 

A good way of doing this is to form a password using three random unrelated words, connected by special characters and numbers. For example (do not use these examples), 

• Sugar-Monkey16-Japan22 

• Desk?Banana.Doughnuts44! 

Password manager software is available which allows you to store all your passwords in one place and it will remember them  for you. This means you only need to remember the password to your password manager, which will make life easier. There are both free and paid for options available online. Ideally you wouldn’t write down your passwords as this makes them easier to be found and used. But this isn’t always possible working in large community groups so if you do have a password log, make sure it is securely stored and accessed only by those who should be using it.  

Antivirus Software 

Antivirus software will help keep your computer and your content safe. There are many different versions available and range from free to around £100. You can also pay for some on a monthly subscription if preferrable. Some suggestions for providers are given in the resource document of this toolkit.  

Your antivirus software should be run over every file that comes into your collections BEFORE YOU OPEN THEM. This will make sure that viruses are caught before they can infect your computer and harm your content.  

Another way that viruses can attack your computer is through clicking on and opening malicious attachments sent to you via email. To prevent this, always check that you recognise the sender email address (not just the sender name) before you open an attachment and don’t click any links in an email unless you are certain you know where it has come from. This is also good advice to follow for any personal email accounts you have.  

It is important to ensure that your antivirus software is kept up to date, so it can recognize and remove the latest viruses. Most antivirus software will attempt to clean up any infected files or will remove them to a separate safe space whilst you decide how to proceed. In the worst case, having a good backup process will enable you to restore your digital data from a version that was created before the virus or malicious attack struck. Most computers come with a built in back up option and you can find details in your user manual or online.  If you would like to find out more about cybersecurity the UK National Cyber Security Centre provides helpful guides and resources on a range of topics. Though these aren't focused on community archives specifically, they do contain practical and actionable advice aimed at small to medium sized organizations and you may find them helpful.

How did you get involved with your community group? 

The research group started in the 1980s as a Wea local history class in our Hertfordshire village. About 6 of us decided to write a book on the history of the village. By the 1990s we had collected a lot of data, and we wanted this to be available to people across the world. So, we used the money raised by the book to fund an open access website. The composition of the group has changed over the years and I, as chairman began to ask people with different skills to come on board for different projects. When we were doing a project recording timber framed houses, a surveyor and an architect from the village joined me.  

How do you collect material for your collections? 

Initially we collected material from the county record office, I photographed records of people such as land tax, quarter sessions, overseer’s accounts, rates etc and we input this information into an excel spreadsheet. These files are available on the website. We also collected old photographs which were scanned by the local museum. They kept the negatives, and we had a print copy. Audio tapes and later videos using an iPad, were made of elderly residents. 

What processes are in place to manage and process your collections? 

Archive records such as census, probate, lay subsidy, saved as excel files were then input into a relational access database of people. About 28 thousand records and each had an individual identifier, but because of non-standardised spelling, searching by name was difficult. To make the record database more searchable, we created a bank of all the names by removing the vowels, so Lake became LK—-. Recently another spreadsheet of house records, i.e. manor court rolls, land sales has been created and this links to the people database. 

The audio tapes were digitized by the British Library as part of the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project. The old photos are scanned and saved as TIFF s for publication or JPEGs for the website. We have our own YouTube channel for our historical videos. 

How do you preserve your collections? 

Most of our collections are on the website. The website is a free resource bank for articles, essays and further research on the history of the village. The website hosting is currently funded by sales of our book but in the future, I would like it to be funded by the Parish Council. The site has been deposited on the UK WebArchive but this is not searchable. In the short term all files are backed up daily on my NAS. The Hertfordshire Archives (HALS) has only just started digital collecting and preservation although there are over 25 excellent local history websites with digital records in the county. We have approached TNA about preservation of these websites, but it seems that amateurs, without standardisation, are ahead of archivists by nearly 20 years. 

The Rules of Access The reason that access permissions are so important is that there can be legal ramifications if you provide access to something when you don’t have permission to, even if you are not making money in the process. The main legal concerns to be aware of are ownership rights and personal data sharing. This level covers both in more detail.

Copyright 

The key ownership rights to consider are covered by Copyright, which is an intellectual property right automatically granted to the creator of any original work that can be seen, heard, or performed. Copyright applies to many types of works, including books, music, photographs and images, paintings, poems and sound recordings. It protects original works from being copied, distributed, or performed without the copyright owner's permission., unless you have permission from the copyright owner, or an exception to copyright applies.  

Copyright law in the UK states that copyright expires after a set period of time - typically seventy years after the author’s death for literary, artistic, musical or dramatic works. However, durations differ depending on the work. You can find out more here,   

 If a donation to your collection is covered by copyright, it is possible for the copyright owner to license or transfer the rights to you. You should get specialist advice to draft the relevant deposit agreement  

 There are number of ways that contributors can license their works for reuse if they own the copyright. The most widely used set of ‘open licences’ are provided by Creative Commons. These enable reuse and sharing of copyright content via a range of freely available licences.  

If you would like more information, the team at copyrightliteracy.org have produced a short film and training pack that can be accessed here.

General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) 

It is important that every individual knows where data about them exists and what it is being used for. GDPR is legislation governing this process that makes sure there are consequences when it does not happen. GDPR is based on 7 core principles which must be followed when processing personal data; 

• Lawfulness, fairness, and transparency: Be transparent about how personal data is collected and used  

• Purpose limitation: Only collect and keep data for the specific purposes it was originally intended for and consented to  

• Data minimization: Limit the amount of personal data collected to what is necessary  

• Accuracy: Ensure the information published is accurate  

• Storage limitation: Delete or anonymize personal data once it is no longer needed  

• Integrity and confidentiality: Keep data secure from internal or external threats  

• Accountability: Demonstrate that processing activities comply with the GDPR and keep records of those activities 

The donor form you created in level 2 should contain information about how you will handle people’s data. Everyone should also have the option to opt out at any time or not donate to your service if they don’t want their data processed in the manner you have documented. 

Take Down Policy 

Always consider offering a “Contact us” or “Request correction/removal” option (often referred to as a “Take-down policy”) on your site This will allow anyone who may have issue to get in touch with you. This can be as simple as providing an email address that is regularly monitored, or an online feedback form. Whilst this does not confer any legal protection, it shows that you are responsive to the concerns of users, rights holders, and affected parties, and may help mitigate the consequences of any mistakes, unintended infringement, or causes of offence. 

There is a wealth of information online about both GDPR and Copyright if you want to find out more. If all else fails always fall back to level one of this topic and never provide access to content you don’t own. It is better to be safe than sorry.

Prepare for access  Providing access to your digital collections, as well as preserving them for future generations, is often the end goal of an Archive’s work. But it’s vitally important to consider and manage any potential obstacles to access provision.

These might include: 

• Copyright is owned by someone else 

• The collection contains personal information that cannot be shared/must be protected 

• Harm may be done to the communities which created the collections or are described by them 

Even where there are no legal obstacles to providing access, there is the potential to negatively impact communities to which the content is bound in some other way. For example, treating content of or about indigenous peoples sensitively and with an equitable approach is essential. 

Just One Thing 

It is critical to plan any access to digital collections carefully, with a view to avoiding common pitfalls. If you are not 100% sure that you have the necessary rights to provide access to the content, or if you have any concerns that individuals or communities will be harmed by making it available, DO NOT provide access to it until the correct way forward can be confirmed. 

Next steps  Thinking in advance about access when you are collecting records (for example, recording oral histories or taking in diaries from individuals) can help ensure you have the permissions you need to provide access. Level 2 looks at how to obtain and document permissions at the collection stage.

Plan for the Worst – Expect the Best No one wants to think of the worst-case scenario when it comes to the collections they look after. But having a plan of what will happen to your collections if you or the group you work with can no longer care for them is one of the most important steps in preserving your collections for the long term.

Creating a Succession Plan will provide peace of mind that should the worst happen, plans are in place to secure your collections. It is also important to make sure that everyone involved with your group knows what the plan is and how to access it if they need to.  

Just One Thing 

A one-page plan which documents where the collections could or should go if your organisation can no longer care for them is the focus of this level. Include names and contact details of the people who will be responsible for transferring the collections if this is needed and include any access information that will be required. Do not include names and details of people who have not confirmed they will help.  

 This template provides more information. 

Next steps  Adding more information to this plan will enable the organisation or person taking control of the collection to quickly access your records and move or process them as required. The next level will suggest more additions to the plan and ways to ensure that everyone who needs it has access to this information.

Make your website archivable  Submitting your web address to a web archiving programme is a great first step, but these programmes have limitations that mean in some cases the full website won’t be captured, particularly interactive or dynamic content. There are steps you can take to ensure as much of your website as possible is captured. This level covers some of those steps.

• Basic webpages are far easier to crawl. Bear this in mind when designing your website. Interactive elements may not work correctly when archived. Clear, easy to navigate pages will help your content stand out as well as make the site easier to archive. 

• Once your web address has been submitted and captured for the first time, use the platform you chose to check the capture. Note any pages not captured, or not fully captured. You may need to submit further web addresses to make sure the full website is preserved. 

• You can submit more than one web address from a website. You may need to do this depending on the structure of your website. 

• You can also submit the web addresses of individual images or other media resources that the web pages require to work correctly. This can help ‘patch up’ any gaps in the archived version. 

If you have any problems, contact the service you used to preserve your webpages. They will be able to provide guidance and support. 

The Internet Archive also offers a more comprehensive service that is free to community archives and can be applied for online.  

Next Steps  You may decide that you would like to archive your own website, so you have more control over what pages and content are preserved. Level three details one option for doing this. Addition options will be listed in the ‘What Next’ resource list provided with the toolkit.