“A huge milestone for Paralympic heritage.”
Natalia Dannenberg-Spreier, Head of Paralympic Heritage at the International Paralympic Committee
Buckinghamshire is the proud birthplace of the paralympic movement and to this day, Buckinghamshire Archives works with the National Paralympic Heritage Trust (NPHT) to make their archival collections and records relating to disability sports more accessible.
Widening access to these collections began with a Wellcome Trust funded project, Spinal2Sport, which ran between Autumn 2017 and January 2020. That project focused on the records of WheelPower, and the International Wheelchair and Amputee Sports Federation (IWAS, now World Abilitysport).
When this project ended, 463 boxes of archival material were still unlisted, so the Buckinghamshire Archive Team set out to continue the work through the creation of a collaborative, volunteer-led, cataloguing project in partnership with NPHT.
The National Archives’ New Burdens payment allowed the team to recruit a project archivist for 12 months to manage this volunteer project. To ensure the project attracted a diverse cohort of volunteers, Buckinghamshire archives used a variety of social media platforms for recruitment including a call out via the Next Door App.
To allow for a fully inclusive volunteer programme, the team offered a mix of both on-line and in-person opportunities at two venues. The success of this recruitment approach brought 30 new volunteers through the doors of Buckinghamshire Archives. This large team contributed around 3000 hours of their time to the project. At the second venue, Stoke Mandeville stadium, NPHT had 11 volunteers who contributed 2000 hours. From winter 2021 to summer 2024, a total of 41 volunteers worked on the project, with a combined contribution of 5000 volunteer hours.
The team received training in volunteer management so they could support a high number of people, including those with additional needs. New workflow procedures were created to ensure the boxes were processed in a well-managed way and accessible excel spreadsheets were created for volunteers to use.
Tasks included listing the documents of each box to item level. A standardised approach to this was essential and staff carried out quality checks of the work and addressed any issues. The project archivist also worked with the different collection levels created during the previous project, adapting and creating new ones where needed. At the end of the 12-month project archivist post, the archive staff took over management of the project.
Thanks to the work of the volunteers, project staff at Buckinghamshire Archives and NPHT, around 35,000 items are now searchable via their new portal for the first time.