Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre
Global Majority community groups’ archives exhibition
The Coming in From the Cold: Taking Centre Stage (2024) exhibition was the culmination of a 6-year programme that helped over seventy projects with Global Majority community groups to explore and share their histories. Coming in from the Cold focused on building partnerships with communities and working collaboratively to ensure each project was developed and recorded in the community’s own words. The result was the collection of forty new archives, which significantly increased Global Majority representation in the archive.
Read a blog about the programme’s digital engagement
Archives: Wigan & Leigh
An autism-friendly guide (PDF, 7.7 MB)
A visit to a new place for some people with sensory or additional needs can be a daunting experience. This easy-to-follow Autism Friendly Guide (2021) created in collaboration with the archive’s autistic volunteers, is designed to support users (and where relevant, their parents or carers) during their visit. The guide can be used as a template to create similar guides to assist visitors, from the initial stages of planning a visit and arriving at the archives through to information about services.
Barnsley Archives
Virtual tour of the archives
Created as part of Barnsley Archives’ Remotely Digital (2022) project, this 360-degree interactive virtual tour of the archive search room is an invitation to start exploring Barnsley’s archives, exhibitions, and collections. With links to further information about the service as well as blogs, podcasts and sound clips, this virtual tour helps demystify the archives and has the potential to attract new users.
Ceredigion Record Offic
Dementia workshop programme
The past is often more brilliant, more vivid, more exciting, and more coherent than the present for many people with dementia. This blog describes how The Brilliant Past (2021) reminiscence sessions were delivered in a residential home specialising in dementia care. By using archives to stir memories and prompt narratives, participants were able to develop the certainty of their past. This helped counteract the debilitating and depressing loss of confidence triggered by memory loss, a major factor with dementia. This is an example of opening the archive to a group who might otherwise never have encountered it and using the material to tell stories that can bring about a meaningful change in the participants.
Cheshire Archives/Hoole Young Chefs/Hoole Community Centre
History taster workshop for children
The Tasting History workshop (2024) was an ingenious mix of have-a-go cooking, taste-testing, and discovering fantastic facts about historic recipes from the collections of Cheshire Archives. Run over half term, the workshop attracted forty small archive detectives/budding chefs. Pea Soup, Soul Cakes, and Cheshire Cheese and Marmalade Tart were the order of the day. A specially created recipe booklet featuring recipes and foodie stories from the archives is available to download for free.
Cultureword
Collecting hidden literary histories
Cultureword (formerly Commonword) is a writing development organisation providing opportunities for new and aspiring writers to develop their talent and potential. Hard Pressed: Mapping Manchester’s Small Radical Presses (2023-24) aimed to recover, collect, and celebrate the hidden heritage of Manchester’s independent fiction publishers and the live poetry scene that grew from them between 1970 and 2010. Voices ignored by the mainstream – working class and poor, Northern, global majority, disabled, LGBTQ+, neurodivergent – were the focus of the project. The Hard Pressed archives were shared through podcasts, live events, workshops, and creative activities.
Read a blog by a Cultureword volunteer about their work
Coram Foundling Museum
Archive-inspired youth performance
Inspired by stories of children raised in the Foundling Hospital and drawing on their own experiences of today’s care system, a group of young people collaborated with writer Brian Mullin and director Vicky Moran to produce Echoes Through Time: The Story of Care (2022), a performance that unearthed common threads of experience across three centuries. The Echoes script is free to download, and a digital resource pack is available to support schools and others learning about the care system.
Croydon Archives
Young archivists’ exhibition
Young Archivists was part of the wider Dynamic Collections project, which aimed to digitally transform Croydon’s archives and celebrate its legacy as London Borough of Culture 2023. The Young Archivists received training in archiving, digital skills, research, project management, exhibition design and events planning. They also participated in creative workshops. The resulting exhibition (2025) presented an alternative youth-led vision of the borough, showing its creators’ hopes for its future.
Read the initial project callout
Dorset Archives and Local Studies/Kushti Bok
Digital heritage map
Kushti Bok is a Dorset charity dedicated to supporting the Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller (GTR) communities. Using community-generated content, the Kushti Bok Heritage Map (2024) shows GTR encampments and other significant places, people, stories, and local history. The aim was to collect the archives of an overlooked community, to generate a greater understanding of GTR lives and culture, and to preserve this legacy for younger generations.
Read more about the digital heritage map in this blog
Glasgow Women’s Library
Celebrating volunteers
Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL) library and archive collections provide vital evidence of women’s achievements, culture, and lives. Volunteering has always been central to GWL’s work. As part of the Three Decades of Changing Minds (2023) project for GWL’s 30th anniversary, GWL invited past and present volunteers to come together to celebrate 30 years of volunteering at GWL and share their memories. This short video captures each person’s strongest memory.
Hastings Museum & Art Gallery
Diversifying the workforce with curator traineeships
Disabled, d/Deaf, and neurodiverse curators are currently under-represented in the heritage sector. The Curating for Change project aimed to create strong career pathways by offering fellowships and traineeships based within host partner museums. Participants produced exhibitions, events, and blogs, exploring disabled people’s histories – while gaining skills for careers in the sector. The Stored Out of Sight: Hidden History of Disabled People exhibition (2023) at Hasting Museum was one of these projects.
Liverpool Archives/Writing on the Wall
Community archiving internships
The L8 Law Centre was established in 1982, just one year after the Toxteth (Liverpool 8) uprisings, which arose in part from long-standing tensions between the local police and the Black community. The L8 Archive Project invited participants to take part in a ten-week course to learn the history of the L8 Law Centre and its significance for the Black community. In participation with Liverpool Archives, interns helped catalogue the L8 Law Centre archive, ensuring that the legacy and lessons learned from the events of 1981 are never forgotten. An exhibition of the L8 Archive Project was shown at Liverpool Archives (2021).
Museum of Transology
Community cataloguing workshops
The Museum of Transology is the UK’s most significant collection of material surrounding trans, non-binary, and intersex lives. Archiving Lates (2023) was an after-hours workshop that reached out to members of the trans community and their allies to get help cataloguing material collected during the Black Trans Lives Matter march in London, July 2020. The aim of this and subsequent ‘Archiving Lates’ was to ensure that the experiences of trans, non-binary, and intersex people are recorded in their own words in this living archive.
Museums Detox
Inclusive governance panel discussion
Museums Detox is a network for People of Colour who work in the heritage sector in the UK. In the 40-minute video Towards Inclusive Governance (2024), Sara Wajid, Co-CEO of Birmingham Museums Trust, and Jeannette Plummer Sires, Trustee of the Council for British Archaeology, discuss how heritage organisations can drive inclusive governance and create spaces where diversity and inclusion are not just goals but lived realities. The key is not just recruiting global majority members, but striving to be supportive, and being open to change/re-definition.
Newcastle University
Virtual reading room
Newcastle University created a virtual reading room service, which gives anyone the opportunity to view special collections material remotely, wherever they are based. Digital appointments use an onsite visualiser and are viewed via the video conferencing platform Zoom. Sessions are one hour in length and are facilitated by a member of special collections staff. Free virtual reading room sessions are available for first-time users, offering a useful introduction to the visualiser process.
Northumberland Archives/Cramlington Camera Club
Community digital preservation initiative
Northumberland Archives partnered with Cramlington Camera Club (2021) to preserve the club’s born-digital photographs using the archives’ designated digital preservation system. The club’s images are a rich resource for the study of local and social history. An initial 300,000 digital image files were preserved and made searchable through the archives’ Calm View catalogue. The project raised the profile of the archives’ community collecting and digital preservation work, which helped start conversations within local communities about the importance of preserving digital heritage for future generations.
Read the Digitally Democratising Archives case study on this project
Queer Britain
TikTok collections spotlight
Queer Britain (QB) is the UK’s only museum of British LGBTQ+ history and culture. One of QB’s aims is to amplify queer voices. Using TikTok (2024), one of the QB volunteers eloquently threw a spotlight on an item from the archives, a poster of Black lesbians, designed by Ingrid Pollard and produced by the Lenthall Road screen-printing workshop in the 1980s. TikTok is a great social media tool for quickly connecting your archive with younger and more diverse audiences.
Queer Heritage and Collections Network
Good-practice guide
The Queer Heritage and Collections Network (QHCN) was founded in May 2020 to increase the understanding of, access to, and engagement with LGBTQ+ heritage. Ten Easy Steps Towards More Inclusive Programming (2020) is a practical guide for archives wanting to be more inclusive in their engagement with LGBTQ+ staff, volunteers, and service users. The ten steps offer an empowering plan for individual archivists or archives who want to do more.
Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales
Welsh Asian heritage project exhibition
In 1982, 80,000 Asian people were expelled from Uganda, 1,700 being temporarily accommodated in an old army camp in North Wales. From Migration to Resilience: A Celebration of Welsh Asian Heritage (2024) was an anti-racism initiative by the Welsh government, exploring the story of this migration and the unique experiences of Asian communities in Wales. The From Migration to Resilience exhibition marked the end of the project and celebrated the profound connections, contributions, and shared stories of Welsh Asian communities.
Shape Arts
Access riders for disabled people
Access riders are important documents that individual disabled people working or engaging with heritage organisations can write to identify their own specific access needs. Helping users to develop individual access riders is a learning process for an organisation as well as an empowering opportunity for the participant to share their knowledge and experience. The access rider templates (2024) shared by Shape Arts are examples that can be easily adapted for archives.
Sheffield Archives/Dig Where You Stand
Archival training workshops for women of colour
Sheffield Archives and Dig Where You Stand created a training programme (2023-24) for women of colour, designed to address their historic erasure from the archives and to create a welcoming space for the women to explore and record their own stories. Working with the Azadi Collective, a grassroots collective that incorporates holistic practices into frontline and advocacy work, the Dig Where You Stand programme combined local history research with the telling of personal narratives, to develop six creative workshops. Partnering with diverse groups ensured diversity of ideas and experiences.
The Bishopsgate Institute/Clean Break
Digital timeline
Clean Break (CB) is a theatre group collaborating with women in the criminal justice system. The digital timeline (2021) was produced by CB’s Heritage Project Manager, collaborating with I Want Design and using content from the company’s archive. This was woven together with oral histories recorded with CB members, staff, and patrons during CB’s 40th-anniversary heritage project in 2019. Telling this history in a digital format means it can be explored from anywhere in the world, at any time, allowing more people to discover the rebellious history of Clean Break, and extending the reach of CB’s legacy.
The Mixed Museum
Wiki-editing internships
The Mixed Museum is a digital museum and archive dedicated to preserving and sharing the history of racial mixing in the UK.
Eighty-seven percent of English-language Wiki editors are men, the majority of whom are from the Global North. Wiki content is skewed in favour of these histories. Connected Heritage – the Mixed Museum Wiki internships (2022-2023) – sought to redress this imbalance by upskilling young editors from diverse backgrounds to research and add Wiki content on under-represented individuals and groups.
The National Archives
Accessible archives workshop
This blog describes how a group from New College Worcester, a school for young people who are blind or vision impaired, attended a pilot workshop to explore how archives can be made not only accessible, but also fun and engaging for blind people or people who are partially sighted. The workshop, Sensing the Archives (2024), centred around the use of sensory props and 3D tactile versions of historic documents.
University of Dundee Archives
Mental health wellbeing workshops
Scaling Up – Changing Minds (2022) was a programme collaborating with people living with mental health challenges, which aimed to improve wellbeing and combat social isolation. The university’s archive services team partnered up with a group from the Dundee Mental Health Network (DMHN) to explore records from former asylums in the area and look at the ways in which patients had been treated historically. The group brought new perspectives to the stories of the asylum patients and, in doing so, amplified the voices of individuals under-represented in the archive.
University of Kent Special Collections/Kent Refugee Action Network
Community oral history project
Family Matters (2023-2025) was a collaboration between the University of Kent Special Collections and the charity Kent Refugee Action Network (KRAN), which supports unaccompanied young asylum seekers and refugees. The memories of some of those who built and sustained KRAN were recorded by young service users. The project not only captured the experiences of refugees, but also the journey of those who supported them. The KRAN Oral History Archive is available via the University of Kent Special Collections’ Listening Station, ensuring that the important 20-year history of KRAN is preserved and accessible.