Community Heritage is an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded grants programme supporting Universities in facilitating and expanding community heritage projects including historical research and archaeological exploration.
In 2012, the University of Nottingham successfully gained funding to launch its ‘Writing Our History, Digging Our Past’ project (led by Professor Elizabeth Harvey) under this scheme. Following the award of Heritage Lottery Funding to ‘All Our Stories’ projects at the end of 2012. the University successfully bid for follow-on funding for Phase 2 of its project. The project, which ran throughout 2013, worked with the fifteen community groups represented on this website. The University delivered specialist training in oral history, the use of digital and other technology, training in production and editing of audio-visual material and workshops on social media and intellectual property and copyright. The project also launched a ‘Challenge Fund’ to support their partner groups with additional focused training, support and activities, to enlarge and extend the ‘All Our Stories’ projects. Several groups gained additional opportunities by this means. Wherever practical, the project utilized student volunteers and those with specialist research or academic skills, to mentor, guide and support the project groups.
In 2013, the Project gained additional funding in support of the AHRC ‘Connected Communities’ showcase event. This enabled the University to develop this website as a means of further enhancing the connections between the 15 individual projects being supported through this initiative. Through a series of generic themes and topic areas, the findings of individual projects can be related to one another more widely.
The University launched phase 2 of the project on 18 March 2013, held a Mid-Term event for reflection and appraisal on 2 July 2013 and an end-of-project showcase and celebration event on 7 December 2013.
The project team for Phase 2 was Dr Richard A Gaunt (Principal Investigator), Dr Chris King (Co-Investigator), Dr Judith Mills (Early Career Researcher) and Dr Paul Johnson (Early Career Researcher). They were supported by a range of external partner organisations including York Archaeological Trust (Trent and Peak Archaeology), Derbyshire Record Office and Local Studies Library and Nottingham City Galleries and Museums. The project gratefully acknowledges all those within the University who provided support and expertise for the project.
The website was developed as a collaboration between the Project Team and members of the Web Technologies Team at the University.
