We are excited to welcome two speakers for our March event, Alessandro Pesaro, Digital archivist at the International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive, and Kathleen McGrath, project manager on the Dialect and Heritage project.

The International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive is a crowdsourced digitisation project of contested heritage at risk whose aim is to preserve the legacy of the bombing war in Europe from 1939 to 1945. Attached to the International Bomber Command Centre, a major cultural heritage attraction in Lincolnshire, the Archive is managed by the University of Lincoln.

The Archive relies on a crowd of unpaid contributors who scan documents, interview informants, process digital surrogates, create descriptive information, and transcribe primary sources. An important component of this workflow is the identification of places, vehicles, and pieces of equipment.

This talk will discuss some good practices to maximise volunteer’s engagement, increase output, and facilitate geographic-based access to archive items, including aerial photographs. These strategies are especially applicable to the contemporary landscape of cultural heritage digitisation, especially at a juncture in which organisations have massively shifted their presence online and are increasingly reliant on volunteers’ contributions.

The Dialect and Heritage Project is a national project based on a partnership between the University of Leeds and five members of the Rural Museums Network. Supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, we have been taking dialect and heritage resources out of the archive and putting them back into local communities where they truly belong. At the same time, we invite visitors and members of the public to share their present-day dialect with us. The project has been able to tap into massive public appetite and has enjoyed huge media coverage.

In this talk, Kathleen will introduce you to the rich dialect archives held at the University of Leeds and share how volunteers were at the centre of the creation of research material and how volunteers helped make the project such a success.

Alessandro Pesaro’s research and teaching activities are both in the sphere of digital humanities and cultural heritage management. He is the Digital archivist at the International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive, and module leader for Cultural and Heritage Attractions Management and Digitising Cultural and Heritage Collections at the University of Lincoln (United Kingdom) and Guizhou University (China).

Kathleen McGrath is a project manager on the Dialect and Heritage project. Kathleen is a passionate advocate of celebrating the heritage of everyday lives of the past and of sharing the enjoyment of words.

This event will be introduced and chaired by Simon Popple, Academic Lead Digital Creativity and Cultures Hub/Senior Lecturer in Photography and Digital Culture.