Leicestershire County Council Collections Team Volunteers!

Leicestershire County Council’s Museum Collections reflect the natural life of the County as well as the histories, interests and aspirations of the people who have made it their home.

The Collections team works with various groups of volunteers who enable us to make our collections more accessible.

Natural Life volunteers

These volunteers support various projects, including repackaging and labelling the moss collection, re-organising the butterflies and moths, and working on the herbarium (the botanical collection of pressed plants).

Collections Care volunteers

Working alongside the Collections Manager, these volunteers carefully clean objects to conservation principles, re-pack collections and help get objects ready for exhibitions.

Costume Collection volunteers

Our Engaging Collections Officer supports volunteers to make padded hangers and covers to improve the storage of our historic costumes, they sew in accession labels and turn their hands to many other projects as required.

Archaeology volunteers

These volunteers work with our Archaeology Manager. They help to document the archaeology collections, assist with exhibition preparation and take high quality photographs.

Below is an action shot of Andy, one of the Archaeology collections volunteers, who has taken thousands of images over many years. His images are not only object record shots but are fantastic for engaging the public with our collections whilst our museum sites and stores are closed.

You can have a look at some of Andy’s work on the Image Leicestershire website and Melton Carnegie Museum’s digital archaeology gallery https://www.meltonmuseum.org/

The Archaeology collections volunteers are also undertaking an audit of the whole collection which helps us to locate new objects for exhibitions and loans and also re-visit forgotten wonderful objects in this huge collection.  The objects are re-packed to modern conservation standards and information inputted onto the collections database.  This task could never have been attempted with staff alone due to the massive number of objects involved, but in 4 years the volunteers have so far catalogued all objects from 1849 to 1989!  An amazing achievement!